A country between Portugal and Spain?
Between Northern Portugal and Galicia, there was once a territory controlled by neither Portugal nor Spain. I’m talking about Couto Misto, which existed for centuries before its official partition in 1864, through the Treaty of Lisbon. Until then, it was independent in practice.
What language was spoken there? In those small villages you wouldn’t speak Spanish, certainly, except in very particular situations. Nor would standard Portuguese be heard so far away from big cities…
What was spoken was a language, quite varied as all languages tend to be, that would be called Portuguese on one side and Galician on the other. These two names, in the 19th century, around the border, would still point to very similar ways of talking — or at least to ways of talking that would not change abruptly when crossing the border.
In this area, we would be hard pressed to know which speakers were Galicians and which were Portuguese — in fact, we can still find older people living by the border whose speech is very difficult to pin down to Galician or Portuguese.
In Couto Misto, part of neither country, the name of the language would be what mattered least.
It was only during the 20th century that the border between Portugal and Galicia — one of the oldest borders in the world — began to clearly mark, in the language heard on the street, a clear division between Portuguese, increasingly standardised, and Galician, sharing more and more mental space with Castilian Spanish.
Couto Misto is one of many small cracks in the map that help us understand how national borders often hide a surprising linguistic world below.
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