Are Portuguese and Gallego the same language?

I’ve been trying to learn Gallego for some time so I was looking for websites in Gallego and found this:

“Somos uma organização de acção social de base nascida no 1995 como aposta dos grupos de base que existiam na altura, e que como eles procura a naturalização da língua própria da Galiza, conhecida internamente como galego e internacionalmente como portugués .”

I always thought Gallego was similar, but not identical to Portuguese.

Galaecian and portuguese are not the same language, though they have the same origin and are quite similar.

I have been told that a galaecian and a portuguese can understand each other if the speak slowly and putting emphasis on pronunciation.

Fernando

Thanks Fernando.

I can understand Spanish and when I went to Galicia I could understand about 60% of what they say if not more.

Yes, I think a Spanish native speaker can pick around 70% of a conversation in Galician. I'm trying to learn it mostly as a hobby. If anyone knows of a website with good Galician lessons, it would be appreciated.

Is more easy to understand a galaecian than to understand a portuguese (for a spanish-speaking spaniard) Galaecian is a beautiful language with a lot of musicality. It is also similar to the neighbour asturian bable, which has not the entity of a language (it is more a dialect of spanish, and its origin is the ancient astur-leonese language).

To learn galaecian/galego/gallego I'll start in Xunta de Galicia (Galaecian Government) which promotes learning of the language (search a bit, I've seen a link to a learning site).

Good luck!

Fernando

Good to see there are other people interested in Gallego. My wife's entire family is from Galicia and over the years I've taken an interest in speaking it...not great, but I'm getting there. It is sort of blend between Portuguese and Spanish.

You're right, with a solid knowledge of Spanish and little practise you can understand a lot of it. Portuguese can be very difficult to understand, I think because the vowel sounds change so much. They completely throw you off. And a thick rural Galician accent can be terrible.

When you listen to the Gallegos speak Spanish you realize that a lot of their expressions and structures are simply Gallego. For example, they always say "Yo comí" and never "Yo he comido", because the perfect tense in Gallego doesn't exist. At least in this sense.

By the way, Gallego is spoken in parts of León (Ponferrada) and Asturias (not to be confused with Bable) and there is even a language called Extremeño (from Extremadura) which is really an evolved form of Gallego too.

As my wife's cousin whose a teacher of Gallego puts it: O Galego é bo para a saúde

Hi! All, my dad's family is also from Galicia, exactly from La Coruña. So like Murdy I'm getting into studying Gallego. However, sometimes I'm not really serious about it because don't have a real need to use it. Probably because I live in the U.S. and never get to talk to my Spanish relatives.

However, after learning English, Gallego is the only language I feel some motivation to learn. I don't know why?

By the way, is Gallego seeing a comeback or wasn’t used that much, let say 50 or 70 years ago. I never heard my grandfather talking to my dad in Gallego. My father grew up in Mexico and lived some time in Spain, but my grandfather grew up in La Coruña and later came to America. I need to ask my dad if el abuelo even spoke Gallego.

Hey Murdy: was that “Hablar Gallego es bueno para la salud”?

Spanish is more used in urban areas, while galaecian is very used in rural areas. Anyway, a good percentage of people speak it or at least understand it.

It has suffered a comeback during the democracy due to government support (for example, it is learnt in school).

Fernando

So it is likely that my grandfather didn't even speak it since he grew up in the city more than 70 years ago.