Basing its approach on the linguistic theories of Eugenio Coseriu, the study takes a corpus of 30 intensive interviews and examines them for indications of processes of linguistic creation and language change in present-day Galician. The emergence of a common vernacular and its bid for emancipation are described in terms of the tensions between a dialectal oral tradition and the interference from contact languages, with the focus of interest centring around the strategies employed by individuals in using the language and the relationship between metalanguage and speaking.