The romance, out of which the present Portuguese language has grown, was probably spoken along the coast of the Atlantic long before a kingdom of Portugal was founded. Though far more nearly allied to the Castilian dialect than to the Catalonian, it resembles the latter in the remarkable abbreviation of words, both in the grammatical structure and in the pronunciation. At the same time it is strikingly distinguished from the Castilian by the total rejection of the guttural, by the great abundance of its hissing sounds, and by a nasal pronunciation common to no people in Europe except the French and the Portuguese. In the Spanish province of Galicia, only politically separated from Portugal, this dialect known under the name of _Lingoa Gallega_ is still as indigenous as in Portugal itself, and was at an early period, so highly esteemed, that Alphonso X. king of Castile, surnamed the Wise, (_El Sabio_,) composed verses in it. But the Galician modification of this dialect of the western shores of the Peninsula has sunk, like the Catalonian romance of the opposite coast, into a mere provincial idiom, in consequence of the language of the Castilian court being adopted by the higher classes in Galicia.[10] Indeed the Portuguese language, which in its present state of improvement must no longer be confounded with the popular idiom of Galicia, would have experienced great difficulty in obtaining a literary cultivation, had not Portugal, which, even in the twelfth century, formed an independent kingdom, constantly vied in arts and in arms with Castile, and during the sixty years of her union with Spain, from 1580 to 1640, zealously maintained her particular national character.[11]