Pinned Post

Once upon a time, I would get paid to translate stuff

Since no one’s been hiring me lately, I’ve decided to make some content from minoritised languages available in English. By minoritised I mean languages that otherwise wouldn’t be a minority but which have suffered from historical oppression and heavy diglossia (i.e. not considered ‘appropriate’ in some contexts) to this day.*I also mean languages that I currently speak or understand to a level where I can provide an appropriate translation, so only romance-based ones.

Starting wiiiiiith: Galician!

'Granny, I won’t go to school today.
And why wouldn’t you go, boy.
Because the town boys tell me I don’t know how to speak.
They laugh at everything I say, they call me numskull and a hayseed.
And it’s not that I’m ashamed of our sweet way of speaking,
nor of hailing from our village,
the most beautiful of sites.
What hurts me, granny,
is that, when I begin to talk back at them,
the teacher comes out and orders me
to learn proper speech
in that language that, to me,
is even worse than a dog’s screech.’
-Luz Fandiño, Galician poet

Quite a long post ahead about language, diglossia and imperialism in today’s Spain, with resources, so if you were only here for the poem, you’ve already got it.

This is a video where Luz Fandiño, born in Santiago de Compostela, Galicia, Spain, almost 100 years ago, tells us of the repression and humiliation she and another classmate of hers would suffer at the public schooling system for speaking the Galician language and not the imposed Castillian. She also touches other topics, such as how the Galician language was treated with shame by some born in Galician-speaking households

In it, she recalls a poem of her authorship in passing, which is transcribed, below, and which I translated into English, above.

The original:

'Madriña, eu hoxe non vou á escola.
E por que non has ir, rapaz.
Porque os rapaces da vila dinme que eu non sei falar.
Búrlanse de canto eu digo, chámanme pailoco e aldeán.
E non é que eu me avergoñe do noso doce falar,
nin de ser desta aldeíña
que é o máis fermoso lugar.
O que magoa, madriña,
cando eu lle vou contestar,
sae o maestro e me di
que deprenda eu a falar
nesa lingua que pra min
aínda é peor ca dos cans.’

My comments:

This is a very strong poem in that it displays the violence felt by A LOT of children at the time against their nearest and most nuclear identity, that of their household, their neighbours, their village.

I translated the last expression to 'a dog’s screech’ for the sake of aesthetics, when the original says it’s even worse than the language dogs speak.
This, to me, is the strongest of statements, no doubt that’s why it comes at the end, bringing the poem to a breaking point of fury and even hatred, I dare say. I don’t think this is anything against dogs particularly, and not necessarily against the Castillian language, but I mean, when you grow up suffering fucking physical and emotional humilliation on behalf of even your pro-imperialist teachers, I think it’s normal you hold some grudge.
Also, when talking to some Galicians, I understood there was something of an old joke where people would exaggerate the raspy [x] consonantal sound of standard European Spanish when speaking Castillian, so they wouldn’t call it 'castellano’, but 'castejano’. This sound is very common in the aforementioned Castillian, but traditionally not present in Galician. I guess one could find it somewhat akin to a dog’s bark.
And then, of course, as much as we love dogs, their barks aren’t usually pleasing to the ears, so stating that the language they force you to speak sounds even worse than that of dogs really emphasizes how displeasing and alien that is to you.

These are all my speculations.

And finally, Galician IS NOT A DIALECT, it is a LANGUAGE. It is NOT Spanuguese nor Portuñol. Although I personally believe it is a form of Portuguese separated by borders. And most Galicians don’t realise their proximity because of the Castillian dominant culture.

Ugh, borders…

In fact, some euro deputies from the Galician Nationalist Bloc party (BNG) are allowed to speak Galician because it is understood as Portuguese and so as one of the Europarliament’s working languages. Suck it up.

So why is this relevant?

From my PERSONAL experience dealing with people from the Spanish state, if Catalans are the proudest and most assertive of their separate identity, Galicians stand on the other extreme (save for many beautiful exceptions, of course). From what I’ve been told, one of the reasons for this was that, unlike Catalonia or even the Basque country, Galicia never had a very rich and solid Galician-speaking elite. Also, low-self esteem from being a comparatively poor region with lots of immigration.

In Spanish pop culture, the Galician accent is generally mocked because it obviously lends from the rythm and intonation of the land’s NATIVE FREAKING LANGUAGE GALICIAN, and is sadly displayed whenever they need a hillbilly.

Galicia is still home to heavy diglossia. If you want to read further regarding that and everything else I’ve mentioned so far, I strongly recommend this paper from 2021: HOW TO KILL A LANGUAGE: PLANNING, DIGLOSSIA, BINORMATIVISM, THE INTERNET AND GALICIAN. It sums up topics such as historical evolution, education & other policies, how the current, Castillian-oriented Galician ortography can be counter-intuitive, social perceptions of Galician, bullying, etc.

But just some quick statistics. From data present here, we can see that in between 2003 and 2018, the number of Galician speakers in Galicia dropped almost 4%, but the number of people that spoke it all the time dropped almost 13%, and the values for those that only speak Castilian began to near the number of those that only speak Galician. Talk about linguistic replacement and depredation. Furthermore, 50% of Galician children are growing up not learning ANY Galician at home and I suspect it is because their parents don’t think it’s useful to progress in life, something I’ve heard a lot from Galicians before too. That is more than a 30% difference from the generation that was 65 and above in 2018 and which grew up under Franco’s repressive dictatorship. Just an example of how regimes don’t really end when they do.

And hmu if you want cultural production to consume or resources for learning more about Galician or for learning the language itself ;)