World Language Map

Where is Galician spoken?

Galician (lingua galega) is an Indo-European language, spoken in Spain and Portugal. It is marked on the map by a ringed point.

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The filter only changes what is drawn. Tap the map to list every language at a spot, whichever family is shown. You can also pick any family from its own page.

Key

Language families (largest ten)

  • Atlantic-Congo
  • Austronesian
  • Sino-Tibetan
  • Indo-European
  • Afro-Asiatic
  • Nuclear Trans New Guinea
  • Otomanguean
  • Austroasiatic
  • Tai-Kadai
  • Pama-Nyungan

Everything else

  • All other families Smaller families, isolates and unclassified languages.
  • Point A language with no area map. The dot sits at its Glottolog position, in its family colour.

How to read the map. Each colour is a language family: a group of languages that share a common ancestor. The ten largest families have their own colour and every other family is grey. Areas are see-through, so where two languages share a place the colours mix. Tap anywhere to list every language whose area covers that spot. Areas are generalisations drawn from published atlases, many of them decades old, and cities are multilingual, so an area never says that everyone there speaks the language. A dot marks a language that has no area map. The family name is always given in words, because colour alone is hard to tell apart for some people.

Where Galician is spoken

Galician is spoken in 2 countries: Spain and Portugal. The table gives the share of each country’s people who speak it, from Unicode CLDR, where CLDR has a figure.

CountryShare of populationEstimated speakers
Spain7%3,309,628
Portugal0.1%14,290

Estimated speakers are the CLDR percentage applied to CLDR’s own population figure for the country, so they are rough. A country without a figure may still have speakers: it is listed because the language area, or Glottolog’s record, reaches it.

Galician has no area on the map because no open area map covers it. The ringed point is the position Glottolog gives for the language.

How many people speak Galician?

Wikidata gives about 2.4 million speakers (ethnologue.com, 2012). These figures are approximate: they come from different sources, years and definitions of a speaker.

Status: Not endangered. Glottolog lists it as not endangered: it is still being passed on to children.

Where Galician sits in the language family tree

Glottolog classifies Galician as follows, from the largest family down to the language itself.

  1. Indo-European
  2. Classical Indo-European
  3. Italic
  4. Latino-Faliscan
  5. Latinic
  6. Imperial Latin
  7. Romance
  8. Italo-Western Romance
  9. Western Romance
  10. Shifted Western Romance
  11. Southwestern Shifted Romance
  12. West Ibero-Romance
  13. Galician Romance
  14. Galician

Related languages

Other languages in the Galician Romance group:

More about Galician

Codes: ISO 639-3 glg, Glottolog gali1258. Glottolog macroarea: Eurasia.

Galician is a Romance language, descended from Latin. Latin’s footprint: the Roman Empire at its height → Latin spread along Roman roads →

Questions about Galician

Where is Galician spoken?

Galician is spoken in Spain and Portugal. Unicode CLDR puts it at 7% of the population of Spain, which is about 3,309,628 people. On the map it is shown as a single point, because no open area map covers it.

How many people speak Galician?

Wikidata gives about 2.4 million speakers (ethnologue.com, 2012). Speaker numbers are approximate and differ between sources: counting who is a speaker, and whether to include second-language speakers, is not settled.

Which language family is Galician in?

Glottolog places Galician in the Indo-European family, in the branch Classical Indo-European, Italic, Latino-Faliscan, Latinic, Imperial Latin, Romance, Italo-Western Romance, Western Romance, Shifted Western Romance, Southwestern Shifted Romance, West Ibero-Romance and Galician Romance.

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