Galician (Galego) is a language form with roots in the Western Ibero-Romance group of languages spoken by the Galician community in northwestern Spain. Galician was regarded to be a provincial language and was not widely utilized in literary works or in academia until the mid-1800s when it began to separate and form a distinct identity from its parent language, Portuguese. During the regime of Spanish dictator Francisco Franco, its use was prohibited and aggressively repressed. With the more recent advent of democratic government in Spain, Galician has been recognized as one of the four official languages of Spain (the others are Basque, Catalan, and Castilian). Its orthography, which was made law in 1983 by the Real Academia Galega, is based to a great extent on Castilian - something that is a contentious issue as many would prefer to have official institutions recognize Galician as a derivative of Portuguese and adopt the Portuguese writing system (though with some modifications). Galician has more than 3 million speakers today.