Language change and variation in the Galician spoken in rural areas in the 20th century: perfect tenses

The use of linguistic atlases to document and study language change is still a new practice in Romance language studies. Despite the existence of material gathered in the framework of language geography projects in different domains and timeframes, few studies have used this material to analyse changes that occurred in language structures since the beginning of the 20th century. Geolinguistic information allows studying the repercussions that significant social, economic, and cultural transformations have had on rural varieties of European languages. This paper aims to show the results of research on language change in the Galician spoken in rural areas in the past century parting from information in two language atlases compiled in two different moments (ALPI and ALGa). We analyse perfect tense variables documented in places from the Galician language domain. The results prove the importance of geolinguistic material for understanding recent language change.