Sociolinguistic Consequences of Economic Convergence in Galicia, Spain

Abstract

Changes in the nature of capitalist production over the past thirty years have allowed regions to assert a greater political and economic presence in the new global marketplace. Galicia, a Spanish region located in the northwestern corner of the Iberian Peninsula, was once Spain’s lowest economic performer. Galicia’s late move from a rural agrarian to an industrialized and technology-based economy has been accompanied by urban growth and drastic changes in land use over the past three decades. These changes have brought cultural consequences to the region, including prominent language shift from the regional language of Galician to the prestigious majority language of Castilian. To help analyze these themes, this article looks at the aims and application of both the European Union (EU) regional development and cultural policies and uses remote sensing tools to track the land-use change of urban centers and agricultural land over a thirty-year period in Galicia, along with historical and current analysis of Galicia’s economy and sociolinguistic geographies. Results show that a policy mismatch exists between EU regional economic and cultural policies, wherein the former inadvertently damages the latter.