language both derive from medieval Galician-Portuguese, and the term is a cultural classification more than a historic–geographical definition. Although, in Ancient Roman times, the Gallaeci were not part of Lusitania province, what became the Galician-Portuguese language developed from Vulgar Latin in Gallaecia, which comprised what is now Galicia, as well as north Portugal, the center of the development of post-Roman Portuguese culture. Portuguese-speaking countries and regions Today, Portuguese is among the most commonly spoken first languages of the world. During the period of the Portuguese Empire from 1415 to 2002, many people migrated from Portugal to the colonized lands. These settlers brought the Portuguese language, which was the, for the majority of the time, mostly spoken by the government and those of wealth, as the natives, who were generally poor under the regime, retained many of their native languages or created Portuguese Creole Languages. With the recent fall of the Portuguese Empire, many white Portuguese settlers moved back to Portugal and Portuguese literacy rates dropped. With the establishment of the Community of Portuguese Language Countries and the Instituto Camões, Portuguese has been promoted and special programs have been created to promote Portuguese language and its teaching. Culturally, Portuguese are typically European and are believed to be the one of the longest continuously established population in Europe; they also have small traces of many peoples from the rest of Europe, the Near East and the Mediterranean areas of northern Africa. The Lusitanian countries, including Portugal, are also inhabited by peoples of non-Portuguese ancestry, to widely varying extents. Language and ethnicities in Portuguese-speaking areas around the world Relation to Hispanic and Latino Lusitanic people have sometimes, especially in the United States, been lumped into the Hispanic label. The term Lusitanic arose because the cultures of Portugal and Spain, and their respective diasporas, though related, are significantly different. Lusitania and the Lusitanians were known long before their conquest by Rome, and their incorporation into the Roman province of Hispania was temporary; both before and after Roman conquest, Lusitania was largely culturally distinct from the rest of Iberia, though the exact geographic center of this culture shifted over time. It is thus argued that Lusitanic people, language, and culture cannot be properly classified as a subset of Hispanic. In the United States, the term Hispanic was first governmentally adopted by the administration of President Richard Nixon, and today is one of several terms of