The central and southern branches are spoken in the rest of Extremadura, and are not different enough from standard Spanish to be considered anything but dialects of the language, since at least the 18th century.
The late 19th century saw the first serious attempt to write in Extremaduran, until then an oral language,[4] with the poet José María Gabriel y Galán.
After that, localisms are the pattern in the attempts to defend the Extremaduran language to the extent that today only a few people are trying to revive the language and make northern Extremadura a bilingual region,[5] whereas the government and official institutions seem to think the best solution is for northwestern Extremadurans to speak a Castilian dialect without any kind of protection.
[6] There are also attempts to transform the southern Castilian dialects ("castúo", as some people named them using the word which appeared in Luis Chamizo Trigueros's poems) into a language, which makes it even harder to defend High Extremaduran, considered more frequently a "real" language and makes it easier for the administration to reject co-officiality and the normalisation of Extremaduran.
There is a regional organization in Extremadura, OSCEC Estremaúra,[11] that tries to defend the language, one journal (Belsana) and one cultural newspaper, Iventia,[12] written in the new unified Extremaduran and the old dialect "palra d'El Rebollal".