If you’ve been following the recent events in Catalonia, you’ve seen the way that language defines how people – and political movements – see themselves within the larger country of Spain. Three languages (including Catalan) have co-official regional status in the country, and together are spoken by close to one third of the population. It’s crucial to understand the linguistic history and make-up of Spain to provide voice-over and multimedia localization to this locale – but it’s also necessary just to understand the current events in the sixth largest country in Europe.

This post will provide a brief linguistic history of Spain and discuss how it affects foreign-language multimedia.

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Different kingdoms – with different languages

Today the Spanish language is spoken by 99% of the country’s population – and this is what you get when you record Spanish voiceover. But it wasn’t always this way. During the Middle Ages, what we now know as Spain was split into kingdoms, each with its own language (and often containing multiple others), and much of it was also under the control of Berber Muslims who had invaded from the south.

The kingdoms in the northern part of the Iberian Peninsula drove out the Berber Muslims over centuries, and in 1479 this process was hastened when the regents of the kingdoms of Castile (Queen Isabella) and Aragon (King Ferdinand) married. By 1492, their collective armies had reconquered the peninsula. The kingdom of Castile – which was larger to begin with – eventually became the dominant economic and cultural power of the region, in particular after it funded the expeditions to America and then controlled its subsequent colonization. This kingdom’s language – Castilian – came to be dominant in Spain and its colonies.

How Castilian became Spanish

As Castile consolidated power over Spain through conflicts of succession, it also formalized the Castilian language. In 1713, King Philip V of Spain established the Real Academia Española (Royal Spanish Academy – RAE), and instructed it “to fix the voices and vocabularies of the Castilian language with propriety, elegance, and purity.” Shortly thereafter, laws were imposed that further consolidated power in Castile, and mandated that all legal documents be in Castilian.

Many regions resisted this consolidation of power and culture, with varying degrees of success. As they did so, their local languages often became part of a national identity in opposition to the larger Spanish one. The case of Catalonia is instructive – Catalan became tied to a nationalist independence movement, and this in part led to a revival in the language of literature and high culture in the 1800’s. During the brief Second Spanish Republic it was an official language in Spain, in fact. However, the Franco dictatorship banned the language from schools and public life, as part of its Spanish nationalist project. It wasn’t until the return to democracy that Catalan gained its current co-official status, and Catalonia its status as an autonomous community. This history drives the current conflict over Catalan independence. And of course, it also affects multimedia – in 2010 Catalonia passed a law requiring dubbing and subtitling of foreign-language media into Catalan. It was subsequently reformed and amended, but there are still some localization requirements for content aired in Catalonia.

Languages in Spain today

So what regional languages are spoken in the country today? Here’s a brief recap of the three main regional languages.

• Catalan: Spoken in Catalonia, in northeast Spain bordering the Mediterranean, as well as in the Balearic Islands, where it is co-official with Spanish. It is also spoken and co-official in the region of Valencia, where it is called Valencian. It is likewise the official language of the small country of Andorra. Because of its co-official status in various parts of Spain, as well as its large number of native speakers (over 4 million), Catalan voice-over, dubbing and subtitling are relatively common requests.
• Galician: Spoken in Galicia, the region of northwestern Spain just above Portugal, where it is co-official with Spanish. Spoken natively by 2.4 million people, and 58% of the population of Galicia. Relative of Portuguese.
• Basque: Spoken in the Basque country, a region in northern Spain that goes into southwestern France. Locally it is known as Euskara. It is not a Romance language – in fact, it is unrelated to any other known living language. Spoken by about 750,000 people. Co-official language in the Basque Autonomous Community and Navarre.

There are a few other languages spoken in Spain, though they have smaller native speaker populations and are recognized but not co-official, like Asturian, Aranese, Aragonese and Leonese. And finally, there are also distinct dialects of Spanish itself that are spoken throughout the country by various groups.

What do you need to know for multimedia localization?

Three things. First, you can use Spanish for most corporate and e-Learning multimedia localization, since the vast majority of Spaniards speak it – and many of them natively. Second, if you’re localizing entertainment content – TV shows, movies, and even video games – you need to be aware of the requirements for certain official or public distribution channels. Finally, if you’re localizing marketing content, you should always be aware of the linguistic preferences of your audience, and consider either transcreating or localizing into regional languages. In short, remember that any translation effort needs to discern the languages that your audience actually speaks, within the context of your particular content. This is a good dictum for localization in general – and it’s absolutely necessary if you’re going into a linguistically diverse country like Spain.