A short post to note last Sunday’s demonstration in Santiago de Compostela, the capital of the Iberian region of Galicia, which drew 25,000 people in support of the Galician language. In recent years the Romance tongue has seen a dramatic reduction in the number of native speakers with only 31% of the population conversing solely in Galician, a figure that falls to 13% for those under the age of 15. The language rights’ movement Queremos Galego or “We Want Galician” has warned that the hostile policies of the Spanish state are pushing the Galician vernacular to the margins of society in the territory, despite the fact that both Galician and Castilian Spanish are supposedly equal languages in the autonomous community. In recent months the Madrid authorities have used legal and financial penalties to reinforce the cultural primacy of Spanish in a number of semi-autonomous regions, notably Catalonia and the Basque Country. In Galicia the obstacles placed in the way of parents wishing to give their children an education through the medium of Galician has become a major source of controversy and political protests.
AN SIONNACH FIONN 
Reblogged this on seachranaidhe1.
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Their language is spoken by 250 millions of people worldwide – it’s not under threat at all.
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Are you thinking of Portuguese? The two languages are quite similar but are still considered separate languages.
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Some consider it a dialect of Portuguese.
And one of the largest former colonial empires in the world surely is capable of spending some cash to promote their language worldwide – just like the UK and the USA are doing.
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Some consider Dutch \a dialect of German…Just don’t tell them that in Terneuzen!!!!
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