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

English and Galician in the Middle Ages:
A Sociohistorical Survey
Begoña Crespo García
cen-tury onwards but which did not have a parallel in Galicia
until the last quarter of the 20 th century.
There are two key factors that determined the different evolutions
of English and Galician: a social factor, i.e. the necessary
conditions for the expansion of a rising middle group were
present in the English panorama although not in Galicia. As a
consequence of the above-mentioned social factor the diglossic
phenomenon left a deep imprint on the collective psychology
of Galician speakers -to the detriment of the vernacular’s
prestige-, which has been transmitted from generation to generation
up to the present day. The period of language contact
in England under the dominance of French and Latin did not
undermine the linguistic conscience of the English population
who always defended, at least in the oral medium, the native
code.
Both languages, English and Galician, experienced an initial
situation of vernacular monolingualism changed by the force
of social events. The imposition of the language belonging
to the dominant group favoured the bilingual panorama in
both communities and the subsequent functional distribution
of the codes in contact in the form of diglossia. Nevertheless,
the degree of linguistic relatedness in each case, -
greater between Galician and Castilian than between English
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