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English and Galician in the Middle Ages:
A Sociohistorical Survey
Begoña Crespo García
is not the case and the social role played by each language is
clearly ascribed to a particular stratum, Taboada (1992: 409)
calls it “ascription diglossia”: Castilian is used in formal contexts
(upper, middle strata) whereas Galician in informal ones
(low strata).
The speech communities under survey belong to two different
types of diglossia. I would describe the diglossic situation in
England as Fasold’s type 2 ‘superposed bilingualism’ because
of the low degree of similarity between the languages before
the contact. Nevertheless, a higher degree of relatedness in
the case of Galician and Castilian turns this relationship into
a case of ‘classic diglossia’ as put forward by Ferguson because
they both were dialects of the Latin family. Furthermore,
the term ‘ascription diglossia’ describes properly the situation
since the use of either Castilian or Galician is socially marked.
The common Latin ancestor and the social pressure exerted
by a Castilian ruling class to the detriment of the prestige of
Galician could have restrained its evolution as an eloquent
and prestigious language under the humanist trend and even
later, up until the eighteenth century.
4. Concluding remarks
In conclusion, the socio-historical study of both speech communities
in the Middle Ages reveals that a similar historical
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