Iberian Romance Languages - Statuses

Statuses

Politically (not linguistic genetically), there are four major officially recognised Iberian Romance languages:

• Castilian, widely known as Spanish, (see names given to the Spanish language) is the national and official language of 21 countries, including Spain. Spanish is the second most widely spoken native language in the world, and the third most widely spoken. It has a number of dialects and varieties.

• Portuguese, official language in eight countries including Portugal. After Spanish, Portuguese is the second most widely spoken Romance language in the world with over 250 million speakers, currently ranked seventh by number of native speakers. Various Portuguese dialects exist outside of the native standard spoken in Portugal.

• Catalan, official language in Andorra and co-official in the Spanish autonomous communities of Catalonia, Balearic Islands and Valencian Community (where it is known as Valencian), and the Italian city of Alghero. It is also spoken in the French department of Pyrénées Orientales (Northern Catalonia) without official recognition. Catalan is closely related to Occitan, both languages have been treated as one in studies by Occitanist linguists (such as Pierre Bec, or more recently Domergue Sumien); thus Catalan is also widely classified with the Gallo-Romance languages. It has two main dialectal branches (Eastern and Western Catalan) and several subdialects, being spoken by about 12 million people (ranking the seventy-fifth most spoken language in the world), mostly in five variants: Central Catalan, Northern Catalan, North-Western Catalan, Valencian and Balearic.

• Galician, co-official in Galicia and also spoken in adjacent western parts of Asturias and Castile and León. Closely related to Portuguese, but also Spanish. It shares origins with Portuguese, from the medieval Galician-Portuguese language. Modern Galician is spoken by around 3.2 million people and is ranked 160th by number of speakers.

Additionally, the Asturian language, while not an official language is recognised by the Spanish autonomous community of Asturias.