Lecture: 'PROPOR24 - A língua galega com outros olhos'

Galician society has been conditioned to see, and therefore to live, the language of Galicia as a subsidiary of Spanish, not very useful and small. In PROPOR24, we will address how that happened and its consequences to end up offering another way of seeing, and above all of living, the language of Galicia.

Our language, in Galicia, has a very different history from the one it has in Portugal. At the end of the Middle Age, the Galician elites changed their language and Galicia joined the Kingdom of Castile. This had three fundamental linguistic consequences, the effects of which have lasted until today:

1. Functionally: our language, in Galicia, came to occupy a peripheral social function, subsidiary to Castilian which is, de facto, the hegemonic language, therefore, the language.
2. Formally: because Castilian is the language of prestige, a process of linguistic substitution begins, the genuine material is lost and the awareness of what is real and what is not is lost.
3. Identity: a process of naturalization of Spanish begins and of distancing from the Portuguese/Brazilian languages, with which there is no contact and with which they feel foreign and, sometimes, incomprehensible.

Biography

Valentim Fagim (Vigo, 1971), licensed in Galician-Portuguese Philology, has been a Portuguese teacher at the Official Language School since 2001 and is co-responsible for online Portuguese LE courses for teachers in Galicia. He is the author and co-author of several books, including Estou a estudar português, Do Ñ para o NH, O galego (im)possível and, in part, the Dicionário Visual Através and O Galego é uma oportunidade. Within the AGAL, he participated and participates in the creation and development of the website "A Nossa Galáxia", the online courses "Falarmos", the study for secondary education "Ops, o português simples" and the courses "aPorto". He is director of Através Editora.