Assignment 2

How has my own family experience been impacted by responses to minority languages and cultures?

I am going to talk about my mother’s language. My mother is from Spain, from a town called La Coruna, in Galicia, where there is a regional language called gallego. People, in this part of Spain, speak Spanish and gallego. These are the two official languages.

But during the time my mother lived in Spain (until she was 25 years old), there was a dictatorship. And Franco, the dictator, wanted Spain to be a united country so he reinforced the patriotic feeling and prohibited to speak the regional languages. So mother only acquired Spanish, and not gallego. She came to France before Franco’s death.

And now we go to Spain every year. In the town I live everybody speaks gallego, but as my mother doesn’t know gallego, I never learned to speak gallego. So we had a lot of problems to speak with other people at the beginning. The whole generation that experimented the civil war (1936-1939) and the dictatorship (1939-1975) didn’t learn gallego. When Franco died, everybody wanted to speak gallego again. So we had to learn it to be able to understand everybody.

Many people speak Spanish, but sometimes they don’t want to or don’t know. In Spain, the topic of regional languages is really sensitive. It is really a political matter. Regional languages do mean something. It is not only a language. It involves the culture and the political problems that are behind.