#i'm no longer gonna use typicalspanish cause there's a blog with that name that i may or may not be involved with

[jackredfieldwasmyjacob]

today is yesterday was the international mother language day, so i thought i could make a post about the languages spoken in spain!

all of this data will come out of wikipedia, so i'm sorry if there's something wrong. i now realise i could've planned this way more, it's my bad honestly, i'm sorry.

anyways, let's start with the mother tongue map of spain; each color represents one language:

light green: spanish, galician: blue, catalan: orange, euskera: grey, aranese: red, asturleonese: green, aragonese: yellow.

the blue dots in extremadura are fala (then northernmost one), and most likely portuguese like the one spoken in olivença (thanks @satyrwaluigi).

by comparision, here's a map with the recognized co-oficial languages (spanish is the national language, and in various regions some languages have a co-oficial status)

the lighter colours refer to different categories depending of the language:

lighter blue refers to areas where galician is recognized as a minoritized language but isn't co-oficial

lighter green refers to areas where euskera is recognized as a minoritized language but isn't co-oficial

lighter red refers to areas where catalan is spoken but isn't co-oficial

lighter orange refers to areas where valencian is the official language but isn't spoken.

the reasoning behind the separating catalan and valencian into two distinct languages is a complex one, if you want more info @useless-catalanfacts made a great post about it (and here is even more info about the topic they very nicely provided me with). in a nutshell, valencian is not a distinct language from catalan and the reason why it's listed as such is political.

as you can see, there are some languages, mainly aragonese and asturleonese, that aren't recognized as co-oficial languages in their respective regions despite the large number of speakers. this makes them especially vulnerable to linguistic colonialism, and is why thousands of peoples from those areas are fighting in order to make their languages official in the state's eyes. if someone knows of organizations or groups that are involved in this movement, please let me know and i'll add them to the post.

apart from the aforementioned catalan blog, here in tumblr there's really great blogs about iberian minoritized languages; i personally recommend @beautiful-basque-country and @minglana for euskera and aragonese respectively, but i am sure there's more.

also, there are some languages that are not even mentioned in the maps despite its critical situation that i thought i should remark here:

fala, as stated before, is spoken in the borders between portugal and extremadura and it heavily borrows from portuguese. it has an estimated 11k native speakers.

caló is the language of the iberian roma people. it has an estimated 60k native speakers between spain and portugal.

darija, the arabic variant native to morocco, is also spoken in ceuta, a city of 80k inhabitants.

tarifit / riffian, a tamazight variant spoken in the rif area of northern africa, including the city of melilla, with 86k inhabitants.

finally, apart from the autochtonous languages, there are also several languages brought by the migrant population, who should also be counted in this post. here are all the languages spoken in spain; the first number is of native speakers, the second one of non-native speakers, and the third one is the total:

the languages translated into english are: spanish, catalan / valencian, galician, arabic, romanian, euskera, english, german, portuguese, asturleonese, italian, bulgarian, wu chinese, french, spanish sign language, aragonese, caló, catalan sign language, basque sign language, riffian, aranese, fala.