Galician

Galicians are the Romance-speaking people of Galicia in north-western Iberia. Their forebears, the Gallaeci, were subdued in the second century BCE and incorporated into Roman Gallaecia, whose Vulgar Latin became Galician-Portuguese, language of the cantigas.

In 409 the Suebi founded a kingdom at Braga later named the Kingdom of Galicia; after spells under the Visigoths and Asturias, it passed to León in 910 and Castile under Ferdinand III in 1230. Santiago de Compostela, seat of the shrine of Saint James and goal of the Camino de Santiago, became Galician capital in the eleventh century; Portugal's independence in 1128 fixed Galicia's southern border.

From the fifteenth century Galician diverged from Portuguese, surviving mainly as a spoken language under Castilian pressure. The old kingdom kept its assembly, the Junta, which briefly asserted sovereignty during the Napoleonic invasion of 1809 before the kingdom's dissolution in 1834.