Political Super Language Groupings

Currently I am taking a course that deals with Catalan sociolinguistics, and we regularly refer to Spanish as Castilian, and Catalan, of course, as Catalan. There is not a lot of data in either direction, but the professor frequently refers to "my language," or will refer to both as "varieties." Varieties, yes, can be used to hedge between language and dialect, but I think in this case it is something else. It's odd to call French and Spanish different varieties for example.

So, Despite Catalans general distaste for being associated with Spain, I started getting the impression that there was almost an interpretation of an abstract "Spanish Language" which includes Castilian and Catalan. Very important to say, I am not suggesting that Catalan is a dialect of Spanish or any such thing, but something more akin to the situation in China, where many unrelated languages and "varieties" are united under the moniker of "Chinese" despite lacking mutual intelligibility. Often these share a writing system, but I believe the organization is often more nationalistic. Since the Catalans feel quite the opposite of this, I found it quite strange to see what seemed to be the same general idea.

At this point, I would probably guess that "Spanish language" has a meaning similar to "language of Spain," that perhaps Basque is also a "Spanish language," under the umbrella of that which is Spain if this analysis is accurate. Since, politically speaking (and we all know to what extent this is an accurate statement) Spain has four official languages, Castilian (Spanish), Catalan, Gallego (Galician), and Basque, why couldn't we discuss them as such? To me, I can almost imagine some kind of more or less abstract or arbitrary designation of languages. Personally, I've written several pieces on "Iberian Languages," where my only real concern is there geographic location. There are probably many historical precedents as well of languages being grouped together for less than genetic reasons, why-ever that might be. Though, strange to hear this specific case.