With the fall of the Roman Empire, Latin lost its center of power. Cornered in the north of the Peninsula with the arrival of Arab culture, each territory spoke Latin with nuances, caused by the languages ??that existed before Romanization. The fragmentation led to a series of Neo-Latin languages ??that are, from west to east, Galician, Leonese, Castilian, Aragonese and Catalan.
This division was reduced to three in the advance of the Christians over the Muslims, who expanded Galician, Castilian and Catalan to the south. All of this is a very condensed summary, what we used to call a sketch, of what happened. The expansion of Castilian did not stop in Tarifa, but reached the Canary Islands and continued westward, to a few American territories, and also to Guinea and the Philippines.
The same thing happened with Galician, which after extending to the Algarve, expanded to territories such as Brazil, Cape Verde or Angola, according to the treaty of Tordesillas, by which the peninsular kingdoms divided the countries to be discovered, to the west and east. of the 46th meridian. The language that was exported to the east of the 46th meridian was the one spoken in Portugal, which was none other than Galician.
Unlike Spain, which has always ensured the unity of the Spanish language wherever it is spoken, Portugal has never had this linguistic-economic perspective, especially because the giant Brazil ate it, and the metropolis did not know how to take advantage of it. the power of an expanding language. Brazil, with more than 80% of Lusophones, was governed by a different spelling than that used in Portugal. And in Galicia, an orthographic model was imposed that copied Spanish spelling and which is, even today, the one taught in school.
The Galician Lusistas are striving to achieve a unification of orthographic criteria with Portuguese, which, although it has obvious dialectal differences, are not scientifically sufficient to consider that Galician and Portuguese are two languages, just as peninsular Castilian and Spanish are not. speaks in Chile. But the de facto division on the border marked by the Miño is marked by political interests too powerful to reverse it.
Having said all that, if Galicia and Portugal unified spelling criteria, respecting the dialect richness as Brazil and Portugal did 14 years ago, we would save a third of the 132 million that they say it will cost to be able to use Catalan, Basque and Galician in the European Union, that is, 44 million, because Galician, under the name Portuguese, has been official in the EU since 1986. And Galicia could boast of being the cradle of this language that today has more than 230 million native speakers and a prize Nobel Prize in Literature like José Saramago.
