Galicia, that place where they now look at your tongue before looking you in the eyes

By Álvaro J. Díaz-Mella

There's a scene many Galicians will recognize. A father orders a coffee in Spanish, the waiter replies in Galician, the son switches languages ​​naturally while watching TikTok in English, and meanwhile, some bright spark in an office—albeit with a hefty public salary—continues writing reports on the “Galician linguistic conflict” as if speaking Spanish in Galicia were an act of treason.

Galicia was bilingual before subsidies existed to force it. Those of us who are getting on in years remember a very different Galicia. Galician coexisted with Spanish with an almost biological naturalness. There were more Spanish-speaking neighborhoods, villages where Galician was dominant, and families who mixed everything without the need for linguistic observatories or institutional campaigns that nobody asked for and we all paid for. Nobody examined people's identity DNA based on the language they used to ask for milk. Now, however, it happens quite frequently.

Few things have done more damage to Galicia than turning a spontaneous reality into a permanent ideological battle. The so-called “cordial bilingualism” degenerated into an insatiable drain on public resources, without solving a problem that never existed.

The most revealing aspect of all this is the psychological impact it has had on Galician society. There are Galicians whose mother tongue has always been Spanish, who live and interact in Spanish, and yet they become defensive as soon as someone questions the system or the waste that sustains it. They have internalized so deeply that criticizing language policy is tantamount to attacking Galicia, that they end up defending a project they neither practice nor are affected by. The one who criticizes ends up being the bad Galician. The one who applauds without practicing it, the good Galician.

The 1983 Law of Linguistic Normalization was the starting point of an industry: creating a difficult-to-resolve conflict to provide it with indefinite public funding and distributing the profits among the business and cultural network aligned with the regional government in power. Four decades later, Galician, as a language, continues to decline, but the business remains. That's not a failure. It's exactly how it was designed from the beginning. And the saddest part is that those who manage this whole charade, those who sign the decrees, administer the subsidies, and deliver speeches in standardized, official Galician, probably speak Spanish in private. Impostors on the public payroll.

Languages ​​don't survive by decree, but by utility, prestige, and affection. When a language begins to be perceived as a bureaucratic obligation, the effect on many young people is often the opposite of what is intended. And yet, the Galician government has been promoting the “21 Days with Galician” campaign for years, asking students from preschool to high school not to use Spanish at school or at home for three weeks. Those who spoke Galician were congratulated; those who spoke Spanish were questioned, asked to reflect on whether their family was the cause or if they were simply incapable. Applying that technique to three- or four-year-old children, who are still learning to speak, questioning the language in which they receive affection in their own family, is perverse. And the result is visible on the street: families seeking more flexible schools, students associating Galician with exams and pressure, and a growing disconnect between the language promoted by institutions and the one heard on the street.

And while the Galician language is losing ground among young people, part of the regional government remains focused on battles that are more symbolic than urgent. The case of La Cañiza, officially renamed despite the historical use of the Castilian name, perfectly encapsulates this trend. The City of Ourense Poetry Prize, funded by the City Council, only accepts works in Galician or Portuguese, excluding Castilian Spanish by its rules. When a public institution discriminates against its citizens based on the language they write in, we are no longer talking about protecting a language, but about punishing those who use another.

There is another issue worth mentioning. Certain sectors of linguistic nationalism, unable to accept that their social engineering has failed, have opted to distort Galician grammar to artificially bring it closer to Portuguese, with Lisbon as the reference point and Coimbra as the model. Traditional Galician is not enough for them; they need one constructed in an office that the average citizen neither recognizes nor speaks. The result is that many end up perceiving Galician as an ideological marker of the most reactionary left, with its corresponding political, academic, and media tentacles. They have tried to save the language by turning it into a trench, and trenches are very uncomfortable places to live.

In 2026, many Galician teenagers will be linguistically much closer to global platforms than to any classic identity narrative. The Galician language isn't declining because someone is persecuting it; it's declining because of a society more connected to the outside world and because fewer and fewer young people find it useful or appealing. That's a much more serious threat than any official bulletin, and almost no one wants to admit it publicly.

The Galician language won't be saved by a congress or a decree. It will be saved the day a twelve-year-old uses it because they want to. But that day hasn't arrived yet.

Álvaro J. Díaz-Mella, May 2026.

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Álvaro J. Díaz-Mella is a happily retired man from Vigo who is already gray-haired and has too many opinions about what he sees in our imperfect society.

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Translation by Elentir. Image: OpenArt