Spain ETHNICITY AND LANGUAGE
Romanesque church in Lérida Provinc
Courtesy National Tourist Office of Spain
Galician bagpipe players in regional dress
Courtesy National Tourist Office of Spain
Canary Islanders in regional dress
Courtesy National Tourist Office of Spain
Unavailable
Typical regional dress in Cáceres Province
Courtesy National Tourist Office of Spain
View of Grazalema, Cádiz Province
Courtesy National Tourist Office of Spain
One of the clearest indicators of Spain's cultural
diversity
is language. Ethnic group boundaries do not coincide with
administrative jurisdictions, so exact figures are
impossible to
confirm, but observers generally agreed that about one
Spanish
citizen in four spoke a mother tongue other than Castilian
in the
late 1980s. Nevertheless, Castilian Spanish was the
dominant
language throughout the country. Even in the homelands of
the
other Iberian languages, the native tongue was used
primarily for
informal communication, and Castilian continued to
dominate in
most formal settings.
Spain has, besides its Castilian ethnic core, three
major
peripheral ethnic groups with some claim to an historical
existence preceding that of the Spanish state itself. In
descending order of size, they are the Catalans, the
Galicians,
and the Basques. In descending order of the intensity of
the
pressure they brought to bear on Spanish society and
politics in
the late 1980s, the Basques came first, followed by the
less
intransigent and less violent Catalans, and, at a great
distance,
by the much more conservative and less volatile Galicians.
In
addition, heavily populated Andalusia had become the
center of
fragmenting regionalism in the south; and the Gypsies,
although
few in number, continuing to be a troublesome and
depressed
cultural minority.
Data as of December 1988
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