Linguistic Diversity: Language Families, Iberian Peninsula, and Spain

Language Families: Origins and Global Spread

Languages that share a common origin belong to the same linguistic family and are considered siblings. The source language is called a mother tongue (e.g., Latin for Romance languages). All Iberian Romance languages, except Basque, derive from Latin.

According to linguistic proximity, Galician is the closest language to Portuguese.

Latin belongs to the Indo-European family. Germanic, Celtic, Baltic, Slavic, and Greek languages are also of Indo-European origin. Some Indo-European languages spread overseas due to colonialism.

Mandarin Chinese has the most speakers globally. Due to its former colonial empire, Portuguese spread to various regions worldwide. Today, it is spoken by around 200 million people in countries where it is an official language.

In many former colonial territories, the language of the old metropole was imposed, but indigenous languages also survived. Centuries of European colonization and current globalization are causing some languages to become dominant, leading to the disappearance of others.

Linguistic Diversity in the Iberian Peninsula

The Iberian Peninsula, divided into three states (Portugal, Spain, and Andorra), offers a prime example of Europe's linguistic diversity.

• Andorra is officially monolingual in Catalan, but due to tourism, a wide variety of languages (French, Spanish, Portuguese, etc.) are spoken in its small territory.
• Portugal, a larger and virtually monolingual country, has two recognized languages: Portuguese and Mirandese.
• In the Spanish State, seven languages coexist.

Languages of Spain: Coexistence and Status

Almost half of the citizens living within the Spanish State reside in geographic areas where Spanish coexists with another native language. The seven languages spoken in the Spanish State are:

• Galician
• Asturian-Leonese
• Castilian (Spanish)
• Basque
• Catalan
• Aragonese

All are Romance languages, except Basque, which is of unknown origin. Spanish (Castilian) is the only official language throughout the entire state.

Other languages in Spain are considered co-official in their respective territories and are recognized as such in their statutes of autonomy. However, two of Spain's languages, Asturian-Leonese and Aragonese, do not have co-official legal status in any of the communities where they are spoken.

All communities that recognize a co-official language have adopted their own Linguistic Standardization laws to promote and regulate its knowledge and usage, thereby offsetting the disadvantage it faces in relation to the state language.