Galician-Portuguese

Galician-Portuguese (also Galaico-Portuguese) is the Romance language spoken in the north-west of the Iberian Peninsula roughly between the 9th and 14th centuries. Two modern languages descend from it by divergent evolution — Portuguese and Galician — which is why it is commonly described as their shared mother tongue. It was also the language of one of the most remarkable lyric traditions of the European Middle Ages: the cantigas of the songbooks.

From spoken Latin to a language of its own

Like all the Romance languages, Galician-Portuguese grew out of the Vulgar Latin brought to Hispania by Roman colonisation from the 3rd century BC. In the far north-west — the old Gallaecia — that spoken Latin drifted ever further from its written model across centuries of phonetic change, until, in the early Middle Ages, it formed a Romance already clearly distinct from Latin and from its neighbours.

Among the features that set Galician-Portuguese apart early on is the loss of the intervocalic Latin consonants /l/ and /n/, a development that distinguishes it from Castilian and that lies behind a great many inherited words.

The written record

For a long time Latin remained the language of writing and administration, even when no one spoke it natively any more. The first documents in which the Galician-Portuguese vernacular surfaces systematically date from the late 12th and early 13th centuries, and include both notarial and literary texts. Writing in Galician-Portuguese — rather than in Latin merely coloured by the vernacular — became general over the 13th century, above all under King Dinis (r. 1279–1325), who made Portuguese the language of the royal chancery.

The songbooks: the great troubadour lyric

The literary prestige of Galician-Portuguese was such that for over a century it became the language of lyric poetry across nearly the whole Peninsula — including for Castilian poets such as King Alfonso X the Wise, who composed his Cantigas de Santa Maria in Galician-Portuguese.

This corpus — preserved chiefly in three great collections, the cancioneiros — is organised into three major genres:

• cantigas de amor (love songs) — a male I laments the coita (love-pain) he suffers for an idealised senhor, in the wake of Provençal fin’amors;
• cantigas de amigo (songs of a friend) — a female voice, of native roots, in which a young woman speaks of her amigo (her sweetheart), often to her mother or her friends;
• cantigas de escárnio e maldizer — satire, ranging from veiled allusion to open insult.

How it sounded

Galician-Portuguese preserved distinctions that European Portuguese would later lose. There was, for example, a contrast between voiceless and voiced sibilants now gone from most dialects: passo [ˈpasso] stood opposed to paso [ˈpazo] , and medieval spelling regularly distinguished -ss-, -s-, c/ç and z. The nasal vowels, born from the loss of intervocalic /n/, were already a well-established feature.

The parting of the ways

Portugal’s political independence (formalised in 1143) and Galicia’s later integration into the Crown of Castile set the two halves of the old Galician-Portuguese area on separate paths. To the south, the Romance followed the kingdom’s expansion and settled as Portuguese, with Lisbon and Coimbra gaining normative weight. To the north, under growing Castilian influence, Galician entered a long period of reduced written use — the Séculos Escuros (Dark Centuries) — reversed only from the 19th century onward.

Legacy

From Galician-Portuguese, modern Portuguese inherited much of its characteristic phonology (the nasal vowels, the -ão and -ões diphthongs), its core inherited vocabulary, and its morphology. The question of the relationship between Portuguese and Galician — two distinct languages, or two varieties of a single diasystem — remains a live one, and is inseparable from this shared origin.