Galician
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Fact corner
- Language: Galician
- Alternate names: Galego, Gallego
- SIL-code: Ethnologue:glg
- Language family: Indo-European, Italic, Romance,
Italo-Western, Western, Gallo-Iberian, Ibero-Romance, West Iberian, Portuguese-Galician - Number of speakers: 3,188,400
- Script: Latin script
Introduction
Galician is a language of the Western Ibero-Romance branch, spoken in Galicia, an autonomous community with the constitutional status of "historic nationality," located in northwestern Spain and small bordering zones in neighbouring autonomous communities of Asturias and Castilla y León.
Galician and Portuguese were, in medieval times, a single language which linguists call Galician-Portuguese, Medieval Galician, or Old Portuguese, spoken in the territories initially ruled by the medieval Kingdom of Galicia. Both languages are even today united by a dialect continuum located mainly in the northern regions of Portugal.
The verb
- There are 4 moods in Galician: indicative, conditional, imperative, and subjunctive.
- There are 3 regular conjugations (verbs ending in -ar, -er, and -ir) and an irregular conjugation in Galician.
- There are no compound forms in Galician. Unlike most Romance languages, pluperfect is constructed without an auxiliary verb.
- There's an inflected infinitive, like in Portuguese.
Sample verb: andar
- Infinitive: andar
- Gerund: andando
- Past participle: andado
| Indicative | Condicional | Imperative | Subjunctive | Inflected infinitive | |||||||
| Present | Past | Preterite | Pluperfect | Future | Present | Past | Future | ||||
| Sg.1 | ando | andaba | andei | andara | andarei | andaría | - | ande | andase | andar | andar |
| Sg.2 | andas | andabas | andaches | andaras | andarás | andarías | anda! | andes | andases | andares | andares |
| Sg.3 | anda | andaba | andou | andara | andará | andaría | - | ande | andase | andar | andar |
| Pl.1 | andamos | andabamos | andamos | andaramos | andaremos | andariamos | - | andemos | andasemos | andarmos | andarmos |
| Pl.2 | andades | andabades | andastes | andarades | andaredes | andariades | andade! | andedes | andasedes | andardes | andardes |
| Pl.3 | andan | andaban | andaron | andaran | andarán | andarían | - | anden | andasen | andaren | andaren |
Click verbs to conjugate them in the table above!
andar, amar, cantar, intentar.
Alternate forms
Verbs ending in -er and -ir show alternate forms in indicative preterite, 2nd and 3rd person singular.
| Verb | 2nd person | 3rd person |
| coller | colleche(s) / colliche(s) / colleste(s) / colliste(s) | colleu / colliu |
| partir | partiches | partiu / parteu |
The following isogloss maps show the distribution of the alternate forms in Galician speaking areas.
Forms like 'colliste(s)' show influence of Spanish.
External links
References
- Bases prá unificación das Normas Lingüisticas do Galego.
Universidade de Santiago de Compostela. Vigo. 1980.
- Diccionario esencial Galego - Castelán.
Biblograf, S.A.. 2 edition. Barcelona. 2001.