Galicians
| Total population | |
|---|---|
| c. 3.2 million | |
| Regions with significant populations | |
| Province of A Coruña | 991,588 |
| Province of Pontevedra | 833,205 |
| Province of Lugo | 300,419 |
| Province of Ourense | 272,401 |
 Galicia
|
2,397,613 |
 Spain (rest of the country) |
355,063 |
 Argentina
|
147,062 |
 Venezuela
|
38,440 - 46,882 |
 Brazil
|
38,554 |
 Uruguay
|
35,369 |
 Cuba
|
31,077 |
 Switzerland
|
30,737 |
 France
|
16,075 |
 United States
|
14,172 |
 Germany
|
13,305 |
 United Kingdom
|
10,755 |
 Mexico
|
9,895 |
| Galicians inscribed in the electoral census and living abroad (2013/09) | 414,650 |
| Languages | |
| Galician, Castilian Spanish | |
| Religion | |
| Roman Catholicism,Evangelicalism | |
| Related ethnic groups | |
| Portuguese, Spaniards, White Latin Americans, Gallaeci, Celtic nations | |
Galicians (Galician: galegos, Spanish: gallegos) are a national, cultural and ethnolinguistic group whose historic homeland is Galicia, in the north-west of the Iberian Peninsula. Two Romance languages are widely spoken and official in Galicia: the native Galician, and Castilian.
The ethnonym Galicians (Galegos) derives from the Latin Gallaeci or Callaeci, itself an adaptation of the name of a local Celtic tribe known to the Greeks as Καλλαικoί (Kallaikoí), who lived in what is now northern Portugal and who were conquered by the Roman General Decimus Junius Brutus Callaicus in the 2nd century BCE. The Romans later applied this name to all the people who shared the same culture and language in the northwest, from the Douro River valley in the south to the Cantabrian Sea in the north and west to the Navia River.
The etymology of the name has been studied since the 7th century by authors such as Isidore of Seville, who wrote that "Galicians are called so, because of their fair skin, as the Gauls", relating the name to the Greek word for milk, but today scholars derive the name of the ancient Callaeci either from Proto-Indo-European *kal-n-eH2 'hill', through a local relational suffix -aik-, so meaning 'the highlanders'; or either from Proto-Celtic *kallī- 'forest', so meaning 'the forest (people)'.
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Wikipedia