Politically (not linguistically), there are four major officially recognised Iberian Romance languages:
- Spanish (see names given to the Spanish language), is the national and official language of 21 countries, including Spain.[12] Spanish is the fourth-most widely spoken language in the world, with over 570 total million speakers, and the second-most widely spoken native language.[13] It has a number of dialects and varieties.
- Portuguese, official language in eight countries including Portugal and Brazil. After Spanish, Portuguese is the second most widely spoken Romance language in the world with over 250 million speakers, currently ranked seventh by number of native speakers.[14] Various Portuguese dialects exist outside of the European standard spoken in Portugal.
- Catalan is the official language in Andorra[15] and co-official in the Spanish autonomous communities of Catalonia, Balearic Islands and Valencian Community (where it is known as Valencian), and the Italian city of Alghero. It is also spoken in the French department of Pyrénées-Orientales (Northern Catalonia) without official recognition. Catalan is closely related to Occitan,[16][17][18] with the two languages having been treated as one in studies by Occitanist linguists (such as Pierre Bec, or more recently Domergue Sumien). When not treated as one, the two languages are widely classified together as Occitano-Romance languages, a group which is itself sometimes grouped with the Gallo-Romance languages. Catalan has two main dialectal branches (Eastern and Western Catalan) and several subdialects, and is spoken by about 10 million people (ranking the seventy-fifth most spoken language in the world),[19] mostly in five variants: Central Catalan, Northern Catalan, Northwestern Catalan, Valencian and Balearic.
- Galician, co-official in Galicia and also spoken in adjacent western parts of Asturias and Castile and León. Closely related to Portuguese, and to an extent Spanish.[20] It shares origins with Portuguese, from the medieval Galician-Portuguese. Modern Galician is spoken by around 3.2 million people and is ranked 160th by number of speakers.[19]
Additionally, the Asturian language, although not an official language,[21] is recognised by the autonomous community of Asturias. In Portugal, Mirandese, which, like Asturian, is one of the Astur-Leonese languages, has official status in the northernmost part of the country.[22]