Obscure Prog Facts

Well, a first thing is that unlike catalan, both basque and gallego share the same phonetic transcription as castilian (or castellano as we call it) so there was little if anything to be changed in this respect. Spelling and pronounciation rules are the same as in castellano.

 

A second thing is that Franco was gallego (from El Ferrol) so even if he also tried to convert Galicia to using castellano he was always protective of this region and did not harrass them as he did with basques and catalans.

 

On the other hand, basque has very weird, completely alien sounding names which have nothing to do with castilian names (or with any latin language for what matters). With no spelling to be changed and no translation possible, he did not dare to change radically the family names of the basque people, that would have been too weird, but what he did is forbidding all the basque traditional first names. So for example you could not name your child Gorka, you had to name him something like Pedro, Juan or Jose.

 

Eventually after the transition Basque people also got the chance to apply for changing their first names to basque names, but in the basque case it was not about a simple translation, the chosen basque name probably had nothing to do with the castilian one.

 

Besides people's names he also changed the name of cities, towns, streets, mountains, rivers, whatever, to make them sound more castilian, mostly in Catalunya but also in the basque country, for example the basque cities of Donosti and Gasteiz were renamed respectively as San Sebastian and Vitoria (as you see not a simple translation like from Gerard to Gerardo), and actually many people and quite a few maps still use these castilian names, I guess with places people are less sensitive than with their own names so even if the official names are now again the basques, you can still frequently hear the castilian ones (by the way this can be very confusing for tourists! )