On the Galician Language, Place Names, and Wine

Once I called a winery in Ribeira Sacra to ask if I could visit them and do some research. The winemaker’s wife answered the phone in Spanish. I explained—also in Spanish—what I was doing, and she hesitated and said she wasn’t sure, that her son spoke the best English but he wasn’t going to be there. 

I broke out the Galician.

It was like a switch was flipped. Her voice lit up with excitement on the other end of the line. “Oh, you speak Galician! Oh, of course, that’s better! Come next week!”

To begin to think about Galicia, its people, its culture, and its wine, we need to start with the Galician language: galego. I’ve been told I speak Spanish with a Galician accent—the sing-song, musical, rising and falling cadence that’s one of the first things people from the rest of Spain will imitate. “Ah, galleguiño!” they’ll say, using the distinct –iño/-iña diminutive native to Galicia. “Que tal las vaquiñas?” “How are your cows doing?” I don’t mind sounding Galician. That’s something I’m proud of: having come to live in a place and developed a regional accent in a second language. It doesn’t make my Spanish any better, but it makes me feel more connected to the place I love so much.

So I went to visit, and the winemaker and I started in Spanish and gradually morphed into Galician. Galicia is like this. Most people will start speaking in Spanish to someone they don’t know, and then when they trust you (or you’ve adequately proven yourself by throwing in a few Galician words per sentence) they’ll switch. His son was there, and we chatted for a bit—also in Galego—about the project and the winery. The next time I saw them was at a cosmopolitan wine fair in Santiago de Compostela. All Spanish. A common trope in Galicia is that most everyone in its interior, rural areas speaks Galego, but in the cities, it’s mostly hit or miss. 

Galicians live on an interesting bilingual continuum: on the one side, you have the die-hard galeguistas who will only speak Galician—my friend dated a girl like this once, who would only speak Galego, even responding in Galician to my girlfriend who only spoke Spanish. Pretty hardcore. Then you have a broad middle category that probably captures 90% of people: they’ll respond to you in whatever language you start speaking to them. People who normally speak Galician as their first language but have no problem switching to Spanish, and vice versa. Then you have the fachas: the not-so-affectionate shorthand for people who sympathize with Spain’s right- and ultra-right-wing ideologies. Among them:  the idea that everyone should just speak Spanish and only Spanish. To hell with linguistic diversity, Galician is only a dialect of Spanish!

It’s not a dialect, by the way.

Like Spanish, Galician is a Romance language— evolved from the Latin spoken in the Roman province of Gallaecia. After the fall of the Roman Empire, Galician and Portuguese were one language called Galego-portugués, which territorial divisions eventually split into two languages over the centuries. Modern Galician is closely related to Portuguese and shares some aspects with Spanish but has distinct grammar, phonetics, and pronunciation. It experienced a cultural renaissance in the 19th century when poets and authors chose to write in Galician, kicking off the “Rexurdimento,” which produced important writers like  Rosalía de Castro. Later, at the beginning of the 20th century, the Galician language and its cultural heritage were at the heart of the nascent galeguista movement. 

During the dictatorship of Francisco Franco (born in Galicia), all non-Spanish languages of Spain were officially repressed, though Galician was still spoken in an unofficial context. After Franco died, the transition to democracy made Galicia one of six autonomous communities with a language granted special protection under Spanish law. Today, Galician has co-official status alongside Spanish.

Sadly, the effects of the dictatorship continue to this day. Thirty-plus years of Franquismo meant entire generations grew up thinking that you had to speak Spanish to get ahead in life. Galician was relegated to the realm of the left-behind: a remnant of rural life, hardship, and poverty. The fact that many parents spoke exclusively Spanish to their children and the overwhelming majority of Spanish in the media has led to a decrease in Galician speakers in general. Unlike Catalan and Basque, Galician hasn’t enjoyed the same support from an institutional level. The disastrous linguistic policies (or lack thereof) of the Xunta de Galicia, the region’s autonomous government, have led to the lowest levels of Galician speakers on record. Fortunately, a grass-roots appreciation of Galician’s cultural value and the language’s increased presence on social media are helping to capture new generations of Galician speakers. 

As for wine, the language is very much alive in the work of winemakers, laborers working in the vineyards, and even on wine labels. For many winemakers, the Galician language is inseparable from their identity as Galicians and wine producers. It’s the language of everyday life that forms an integral part of their history and culture, gives names to places and concepts, and exemplifies the deep union between a people and their land. 

And one example of that union can be found in place names. Galicia is like a Russian nesting doll of toponyms, with each division containing other subdivisions—all with their own names, of course. In order from largest to smallest, they are:

Provincia – Comarca – Concello – Parroquia – Lugar

Galicia has 4 provincias, 53 comarcas, 313 concellos, 3,792 parroquias, and 523,000 lugares—which translates to “places.” Although it might seem like a complex system, these divisions make sense in the context of Galician history. With a population that was overwhelmingly located in sparsely populated rural areas, having detailed place names meant different administrations—whether ecclesiastical, monarchical, or civil—could keep track of where people lived.

The four provinces are divided into comarcas, a Spanish unit of organization that corresponds roughly to a county or shire—the Spanish version of the Lord of the Rings translates Frodo and Bilbo’s home as “La Comarca.” Within each comarca, there are multiple concellos: basically, towns. The next layer is the parroquia or parish. This would be something like a hamlet, and in Galicia, it’s a middle ground between the larger designation of concello and the smaller designation of “entidad singular de población,” also known as a lugar.

Finally, within each parroquia, there are lugares. These are the smallest administrative units in Galicia. And small does mean small. The law stipulates that a lugar has to have at least ten buildings, all connected by streets. The word “streets” might evoke the idea that two cars, or at the very least one car, can fit comfortably by. Think again. In practice, lugares are collections of houses built well before the invention of the automobile, with the narrow gaps between them passing for streets. Galicians have an uncanny ability for spatial reasoning, as they never seem to have trouble judging exactly whether or not their car is going to fit between two buildings. Lugares are known in Spanish as “entidades singulares de población,” defined by law as any area of a municipality (inhabited or uninhabited) known by a specific name that identifies it without the possibility of confusion. 

Whoever wrote that “without the possibility of confusion” clearly didn’t have Galicia in mind. 

Galicia boasts 300 different lugares called A Igrexa, “The Church”, making it the most common place name in all of Spain. In second place is O Outeiro, “The Hill,” with 164 places all sharing a name to confuse your Google Maps. If you take a look at a list of the top most-repeated place names in all of Spain, only a fraction can be found outside Galicia. Here, place names have been alternatively amusing and horrifying visitors for as long as anyone can remember. 

Some highlights include Boimorto (literally translates to “dead ox” in Galician, but it apparently means something like “big rock” in ancient Indo-European), Os Anxeles (you don’t have to leave Spain to visit the “City” of Angels), Exipto (Egypt), and Vilapene, to the delight of decades of teenagers—that’s something like “Penisville”, although the name likely comes from a Roman named Penius who built his villa in the area. Lugares also provide credible evidence for the theory that whoever decided to divvy up parroquias was getting a kickback from road sign companies: Spain’s highways have signs letting drivers know both when they enter a town and when they leave it. Whizzing along the carretera nacional, more often than not a lugar is a case of “don’t blink or you’ll miss it.”