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English and Galician in the Middle Ages:
A Sociohistorical Survey
Begoña Crespo García
would not be carefully studied until the 16 th century. Despite
the fact that the Renaissance expansion of knowledge acted
on Castilian, it did not touch Galician at all. The standardisation
of the latter began in the 20 th century and is still a matter
of debate. STABILITY is another criterion that can be used
to depict diglossia. In England it took around three centuries
to overcome this language confl ict. In Galicia diglossia is still
present.
GRAMMAR stands for the differences or similitudes between
the grammatical structures of As and Bs. The grammatical
differences between English and French are opposed to the
lesser number of differences in the Galician-Castilian pair.
LEXICON implies the existence of synonyms of common concepts
with two realisations: oral or B version and its equivalent
in writing or A version. The existence of paired items with
different sociolinguistic connotations illustrates this aspect:
English (animal)-French (meat): swine -pork, ox- beef, calf -
veal, sheep- mutton. Social distance is linguistically refl ected
in the coexistence of two nouns of different origin and semantic
referent: the noun of Saxon origin names the animal
and the French origin term refers to the corresponding meat
(Hughes, 2000).
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