The Galician language has been studied from a wide range of perspectives by Galician scholars of sociolinguistics and its related strands. Formal sociolinguistic studies of the language begin to appear from the 1970s onwards. The Guía Bibliográfica de Lingüística Galega (Bibliographic Guide to Galician Linguistics) provides an excellent online resource on the vast number of studies that have been conducted over recent decades. Outside Galicia, however, a lot of this work remains unknown. This is in part due to the fact that Galician publications have only recently become available in translation (see, for example, Fernández-Ferreiro and Ramallo 2002-03; Monteagudo and Santamarina 1993) or through Galician scholars writing in English (see, for example, Álvarez-Cáccamo 1993; Loureiro Rodríguez 2008). In comparison with some of the other languages of Spain, in particular Catalan and Basque, Galician has perhaps not received the attention that it deserves in the international sociolinguistic literature. In discussions of multilingualism in Spain references to Galician have tended to be at best sporadic and at worst non-existent. This trend, however, seems to have changed somewhat over more recent decades with a heightening of external interest in the particularities of the Galician context, and we begin to find more detailed accounts of the language (see, for example, Beswick 2007; Hoffmann 1996: Mar-Molinero 2000; O'Rourke 2006, 2011a; Roseman 1995; Turell 2001).

Although numbers vary according to source it is estimated that of Galicia's almost three million inhabitants, more than 90 per cent claim an ability to speak Galician (IGE 2008).