Spanish Americans | Research & Encyclopedia Articles

This tendency has not diminished in recent years; in fact, the government has moved toward a less centralized form of rule by dividing the country into autonomías (autonomous areas) linkedto Madrid (Spain's capital city) in a loose federalism that accommodates and even encourages more local control than the country has known for centuries.

Among the major regions in Spain are Castile, which includes the capital city of Madrid; Cataluña, which includes the city of Barcelona; Andalucía, which includes Seville; Extremadura; Galicia; and the Basque Country.

While centralist regimes of the past favored a standard national language, the Spanish government today encourages the schooling in and general use of regional dialects and languages. Galicians, for example, who occupy the northwest corner of the peninsula, speak Gallego. It is a language that reflects in vocabulary and structure the region's proximity to Portugal, to the south, and Castile, to the east. Residents of Cataluña speak Catalan, a Romance language that shares many features with other Romance languages such as Spanish and French but that is distinct from them. In Castile, the country's central region, the residents speak Castellano, which is also the language of most Latin American countries and, outside of Spain, is commonly thought of as the standard Spanish language.

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