Spanish language

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Spanish, Castilian Español, Castellano
Pronunciation:	/espaˈɲol/, /kasteˈʎano/ - /kasteˈʝano/
Spoken in:	Spanish speaking countries:  Argentina,  Bolivia,  Chile,  Colombia,  Costa Rica,  Cuba,  Dominican Republic,  Ecuador,  Equatorial Guinea,  El Salvador,  Guatemala,  Honduras,  Mexico,  Nicaragua,  Panama,  Paraguay,  Peru,  Puerto Rico,  Spain,  Uruguay,  Venezuela, and a significant number of the populations of  Andorra,  Belize,  Gibraltar, and the  United States.
Total speakers:	First languagea: 322[1]– c. 400 million[2][3][4] Totala: 400–500 million[5][6][7] aAll numbers are approximate.
Ranking:	2 (native speakers)[8][9][10][11] 3 (total speakers)
Language family:	Indo-European  Italic   Romance    Italo-Western     Gallo-Iberian      Ibero-Romance       West Iberian        Spanish, Castilian
Writing system:	Latin (Spanish variant)
Official status
Official language in:	21 countries
Regulated by:	Asociación de Academias de la Lengua Española (Real Academia Española and 21 other national Spanish language academies)
Language codes
ISO 639-1:	es
ISO 639-2:	spa
ISO 639-3:	spa
Note: This page may contain IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode.

Spanish (español (help·info)) or Castilian (castellano) is an Indo-European, Romance language that originated in northern Spain, and gradually spread in the Kingdom of Castile and evolved into the principal language of government and trade. It was taken to Africa, the Americas, and Asia Pacific with the expansion of the Spanish Empire between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Today, between 322 and 400 million people speak Spanish as a native language,^[12][6] making it the world's second most-spoken language by native speakers (after Mandarin Chinese).^[13][14]

Hispanosphere

See also: Spanish Empire

Spanish identified as the sole Official language     Spanish identified as a Co-Official language

The Countries of the Hispanic-influenced World

It is estimated that the combined total of native and non-native Spanish speakers is approximately 500 million, likely making it the third most spoken language by total number of speakers (after English and Chinese).^[12][6]
Today, Spanish is an official language of Spain, most Latin American countries, and Equatorial Guinea; 21 nations speak it as their primary language. Spanish also is one of six official languages of the United Nations. Mexico has the world's largest Spanish-speaking population, and Spanish is the second most-widely spoken language in the United States ^[15] and the most popular studied foreign language in U.S. schools and universities.^[16][17] Global internet usage statistics for 2007 show Spanish as the third most commonly used language on the Internet, after English and Chinese. ^[18]

Naming and origin

Main article: Names given to the Spanish language

Spaniards tend to call this language español (Spanish) when contrasting it with languages of other states, such as French and English, but call it castellano (Castilian), that is, the language of the Castile region, when contrasting it with other languages spoken in Spain such as Galician, Basque, and Catalan. This reasoning also holds true for the language's preferred name in some Hispanic American countries. In this manner, the Spanish Constitution of 1978 uses the term castellano to define the official language of the whole Spanish State, as opposed to las demás lenguas españolas (lit. the other Spanish languages). Article III reads as follows:

“

El castellano es la lengua española oficial del Estado. (…) Las demás lenguas españolas serán también oficiales en las respectivas Comunidades Autónomas… Castilian is the official Spanish language of the State. (…) The other Spanish languages shall also be official in their respective Autonomous Communities…

”

The name castellano is, however, widely used for the language as a whole in Latin America. Some Spanish speakers consider castellano a generic term with no political or ideological links, much as "Spanish" is in English. Often Latin Americans use it to differentiate their own variety of Spanish as opposed to the variety of Spanish spoken in Spain, or variety of Spanish which is considered as standard in the region.^{[citation needed]}

Classification and related languages

Spanish is closely related to the other West Iberian Romance languages: Asturian (asturianu), Galician (galego), Ladino (dzhudezmo/spanyol/kasteyano), and Portuguese (português). Catalan, an East Iberian language which exhibits many Gallo-Romance traits, is more similar to the neighbouring Occitan language (occitan) than to Spanish, or indeed than Spanish and Portuguese are to each other.

Spanish and Portuguese share similar grammars and vocabulary as well as a common history of Arabic influence while a great part of the peninsula was under Islamic rule (both languages expanded over Islamic territories). Their lexical similarity has been estimated as 89%.^[8] See Differences between Spanish and Portuguese for further information.

Ladino

Further information: Ladino language

Ladino, which is essentially medieval Spanish and closer to modern Spanish than any other language, is spoken by many descendants of the Sephardi Jews who were expelled from Spain in the 15th century. Ladino speakers are currently almost exclusively Sephardi Jews, with family roots in Turkey, Greece or the Balkans: current speakers mostly live in Israel and Turkey, with a few pockets in Latin America. It lacks the Native American vocabulary which was influential during the Spanish colonial period, and it retains many archaic features which have since been lost in standard Spanish. It contains, however, other vocabulary which is not found in standard Castilian, including vocabulary from Hebrew, some French, Greek and Turkish, and other languages spoken where the Sephardim settled.

Ladino is in serious danger of extinction because many native speakers today are elderly as well as elderly olim (immigrants to Israel) who have not transmitted the language to their children or grandchildren. However, it is experiencing a minor revival among Sephardi communities, especially in music. In the case of the Latin American communities, the danger of extinction is also due to the risk of assimilation by modern Castilian.

A related dialect is Haketia, the Judaeo-Spanish of northern Morocco. This too tended to assimilate with modern Spanish, during the Spanish occupation of the region.

Vocabulary comparison

Spanish and Italian share a very similar phonological system. At present, the lexical similarity with Italian is estimated at 82%.^[8] As a result, Spanish and Italian are mutually intelligible to various degrees. The lexical similarity with Portuguese is greater, 89%, but the vagaries of Portuguese pronunciation make it less easily understood by Hispanophones than Italian. Mutual intelligibility between Spanish and French or Romanian is even lower (lexical similarity being respectively 75% and 71%^[8]): comprehension of Spanish by French speakers who have not studied the language is as low as an estimated 45% - the same as of English. The common features of the writing systems of the Romance languages allow for a greater amount of interlingual reading comprehension than oral communication would.

Latin	Spanish	Galician	Portuguese	Catalan	Italian	French	Romanian	English
nos	nosotros	nós/nosoutros	nós¹	nosaltres	noi²	nous³	noi	we
fratrem germānum (acc.) (lit. "true brother", i.e. not a cousin)	hermano	irmán	irmão	germà	fratello	frère	frate	brother
dies Martis (Classical) tertia feria (Ecclesiastical)	martes	martes	terça-feira	dimarts	martedì	mardi	marți	Tuesday
cantiō (nem, acc.), canticum	canción	canción	canção	cançó	canzone	chanson	cântec	song
magis or plus	más (archaically also plus)	máis	mais (archaically also chus)	més (archaically also pus)	più	plus	mai	more
manum sinistram (acc.)	mano izquierda also (mano siniestra)	man esquerda	mão esquerda (archaically also sẽestra)	mà esquerra	mano sinistra	main gauche	mâna stângă	left hand
nihil or nullam rem natam (acc.) (lit. "no thing born")	nada	nada/ren	nada (archaically also rem)	res	niente/nulla	rien/nul	nimic	nothing

1. also nós outros in early modern Portuguese (e.g. The Lusiads)
2. noi altri in Southern Italian dialects and languages
3. Alternatively nous autres

History

Main article: History of the Spanish language

Spanish evolved from Vulgar Latin, with major influences from Arabic in vocabulary during the Andalusian period^[19] and minor surviving influences from Basque and Celtiberian, as well as Germanic languages via the Visigoths. Spanish developed along the remote cross road strips among the Alava, Cantabria, Burgos, Soria and La Rioja provinces of Northern Spain, as a strongly innovative and differing variant from its nearest cousin, Leonese speech, with a higher degree of Basque influence in these regions (see Iberian Romance languages). Typical features of Spanish diachronical phonology include lenition (Latin vita, Spanish vida), palatalization (Latin annum, Spanish año, and Latin anellum, Spanish anillo) and diphthongation (stem-changing) of short e and o from Vulgar Latin (Latin terra, Spanish tierra; Latin novus, Spanish nuevo). Similar phenomena can be found in other Romance languages as well.

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