If you think that's impressive, look at all the choices under Hispanic. (Why do they need separate listings for Gallego and Galician?!)
Galician is not.
Galician is considered to be either a dialect of Portuguese, or a separate language. Brazilian and Purtuguese are not Hispanic.
"Gallego is Hispanic. Galician is not." Not sure what you're getting at here. Gallego is simply the Spanish word for what English people call Galician. (Galego, with one L, is their own word for it.) Thus, Gallego, Galego, and Galician are the same thing. I'm aware that there's an argument over whether it is a dialect of Portuguese or its own language, but that's not the point. Galicia is in Spain, is it not? Do we exclude galicians, catalonians, valencians, and asturians because they're not castellano? That's just as confusing.
I found some code books going back to 1980 when the Ancestry question was first asked. It appears that they were still working on how to convert write-in entries into codes (this might have been an on the-fly operations as non-expected responses were interpreted). By 1990, the code book for ancestries had been redone, with new code numbers assigned (001 is now Alsatian, while for 1980, 001 was Austrian. There have been minimal changes in ancestry coding since 1990. They have been much more significant for places of birth. Someone born in Kosovo may now indicate that, but would still have to specify Albanian, Serb, Yugoslavian, or some other ancestry.
In 1980 Gallego (Galician) was coded as 204, and included in a Spaniard group that also included individual codes for Catalonian, Basque, and Balearic Islander. The parentheses indicates alternative entries that were coded together (eg Dutch (Hollander, Netherlander) are all coded as 014. This practice is still true, though Dutch is now 021.
By 1990 Gallego was coded as 206, and Galician was no longer considered an alternative spelling. Along with Gallego, Catalonian, and Balearic Islander; Andalusian, Asturian, Castillean, Valencian, and Canary Islander were now distinct codes, but also aggregated with Spaniard. Basque was no longer Spaniard, and is not considered Hispanic.
Galician, Silesian, and Bukovina are now separate codes, but are listed among more generic entries. Silesian and Bukovina are listed after Eastern European. To me, this suggests that the Census Bureau recognizes that as a valid entry, but is uncertain how to group persons (e.g. should Bukovina be grouped with Ukrainian, Romanian, or German?).
Galician is under European which indicates that it might refer to either Spanish Galicia, or pre-WWI Austrian Galicia. Even if it refers to Austrian Galicia, it might be either Ukrainian or Polish. There may be some responses of Galician that the Census Bureau is able to associate with Spain such as ("Spanish Galicia", "Galicia (Span)", "Galicia (La Coruna)") but "Galician" is no longer included in the code book, since Gallego is unambiguous.
In any case Andorran, Cypriot, Greek Cypriote, Turkish Cypriote, Lapp, Liechtensteiner, Manx, Monegasque, Azerbaijani, Ruthenian, Cossack, Finno Ugrian, Mordovian, Voytak, Gruziia, Kalmyk,
North Caucasian, North Caucasian Turkic, Ossetian, Soviet Turkic, Bashkir, Chuvash, Gagauz, Mesknetian, Tuvinian, Yakut, Soviet Union, Tatar, Soviet Central Asia, Windish, Bukovina, Silesian,
Galician, San Andres, Providencia, Surinam, Inuit, Aryan, and Greenlander are all collapsed into a single Other category in PUMS data.
