English and Galician in the Middle Ages - Publicaciones ...

English and Galician in the Middle Ages:
A Sociohistorical Survey
Begoña Crespo García
He also establishes a subdivision pointing to three types of
diglossia:
1. “Classic diglossia”: the one referred to by Ferguson. It involves
divergent dialects.
2. “Superposed bilingualism”: the languages involved are not
very closely related.
3. “Style-shifting”: it deals with stylistic differences. There is a
close connection between the codes in contact.
Fasold seems to include languages with a different degree
of linguistic relatedness in his defi nition. That is the reason
why when applying his subdivision to English and Galician we
come across two different situations: when Norman French
invaded the power circles of English life the relation between
these two languages was comparatively distant. Old English
descended from a West-Germanic branch of the Indo-European
family whereas Old French was of Italic origin. Their
only point of convergence was the footprints left by the bands
of Northmen (9 th /10 th centuries) that had settled in both countries:
in the North and East of England and in Normandy (Fennell,
2001). However, the fact that Latin was the common root
of Galician and Castilian implies a close connection between
the two. The different linguistic substrata in the peninsula before
the coming of the Romans and the circumstances under
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