Spanish language

Spanish (español) or Castilian (castellano) is an Iberian Romance language, and the fourth most-widely spoken language in the world according to some sources, while other sources list it as the second or third most spoken language. It is spoken as a first language by about 352 million people, or by 417 million including non-native speakers (according to 1999 estimates). Some assert that, after English, Spanish can now be considered the second most important language in the world (probably replacing even French), due to its increased usage in the United States, the high birth rate in most of the countries where it is official, the growing economies of the Spanish-speaking world, its influence on the global music market, the importance of its literature, and simply due to the broad number of areas on the Earth's surface where the language is spoken.

Naming

Main article: Names given to the Spanish language

Spanish people tend to call this language español when contrasting it with languages of other states (for example: in a list with French and English), but call it castellano (Castilian, from the Castile region) when contrasting it with other languages of Spain (such as Galician, Basque, and Catalan/Valencian). In some parts of Spain, mainly where the people speak Galician, Basque, and Catalan, it is considered offensive to call the language español, as that is what Francisco Franco imposed during his dictatorship and because it connotes that Basque, Catalan and Galician are not Spanish (meaning from Spain). For the rest of the Spanish-speaking world, speakers of the language in some areas refer to it as español, and in others castellano is more common. Castellano is the name given to Spanish language in Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Central America, Colombia, Ecuador, Paraguay, Perú, Uruguay and Venezuela.

Some philologists use Castilian only when speaking of the language spoken in Castile during the Middle Ages, stating that it is preferable to use Spanish for its modern form. Castilian can be also a subdialect of Spanish spoken in most parts of modern day Castile. It would have a series of characteristics and a specific pronunciation different to the one of Andalusia or Aragon for example, where they would speak different subdialects.

Classification and related languages

Spanish is a member of the Romance branch of Indo-European, descended largely from Latin and having much in common with its European geographical neighbours.

Spanish is related to several languages in terms of phonology, grammar and orthography. Of these, Portuguese is perhaps one of the most similar in terms of major languages. However, Spanish is also closely related to Catalan, Asturian, Galician and several other Romance languages. Spanish has fewer similarities with French and Italian but shares strong ties due to Latin roots.

Portuguese is orthographically similar in many ways to Spanish but it has a very distinctive phonology. A speaker of one of these languages may require some practice to effectively understand a speaker of the other (although generally it is easier for a Portuguese native speaker to understand Spanish than the other way around). Compare, for example:

Ela fecha sempre a janela antes de jantar. (Portuguese)

Ella cierra siempre la ventana antes de cenar. (Spanish)

Some less common phrasings and word choices have closer cognates in Spanish because Portuguese has managed to retain a much larger vocabulary, with stronger Latin heritage:

Ela cerra sempre a janela antes de cear. (less common Portuguese)

(Which translates as "She always closes the window before having dinner.")

In some places, Spanish and Portuguese are spoken almost interchangeably. Portuguese speakers are generally able to read Spanish, and Spanish speakers are generally able to read Portuguese, even if they cannot understand the spoken language. In fact, the number of bilingual speakers in Brazil (where Portuguese is the official language) has greatly risen because nearly every nation bordering Brazil is Spanish speaking.

History

Main article: History of the Spanish language

Image:Page of Lay of the Cid.jpg The Spanish language developed from vulgar Latin, with influence from Celtiberian, Basque and Arabic, in the north of the Iberian Peninsula (see Iberian Romance languages). Typical features of Spanish diachronical phonology include lenition (Latin vita, Spanish vida), palatalization (Latin annum, Spanish año) 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 most other Romance languages as well.

During the Reconquista, this northern dialect was carried south, and indeed is still a minority language in northern Morocco.

The first Latin to Spanish dictionary (Gramática de la Lengua Castellana) was written in Salamanca, Spain, in 1492 by Elio Antonio de Nebrija. When Isabella of Castile was presented with the book, she asked, What do I want a work like this for, if I already know the language?, to which he replied, Ma'am, the language is the instrument of the Empire.

From the 16th century on, the language was brought to the Americas, Federated States of Micronesia, Guam, Marianas, Palau and the Philippines by Spanish colonization.

In the 20th century, Spanish was introduced in Equatorial Guinea and Western Sahara and parts of the United States, such as Spanish Harlem in New York City, that had not been part of the Spanish Empire.

For details on borrowed words and other external influences in Spanish, see Influences on the Spanish language.

Geographic distribution

Spanish is one of the official languages of the United Nations and the European Union. The majority of its speakers are confined to the Western Hemisphere, and Spain.

With approximately 106 million first-language and second-language speakers, Mexico boasts the largest population of Spanish-speakers in the world. The four next largest populations reside in Colombia (44 million), Spain (c. 44 million), Argentina (39 million) and the United States of America (U.S. residents age 5 and older who speak Spanish at home number 31 million) [1].

Spanish is the official and most important language in 20 countries: Argentina, Bolivia (co-official Quechua and Aymara), Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Equatorial Guinea (co-official French), Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay (co-official Guaraní), Peru (co-official Quechua and Aymara), Puerto Rico (co-official English), Spain (co-official Catalan/Valencian, Galician and Basque), Uruguay, Venezuela, and Western Sahara (co-official Arabic).

In Belize, Spanish holds no official recognition, however, it is the native tongue of about 50% of the population, and is spoken as a second language by another 20%. It is arguably the most important and widely-spoken on a popular level, but English remains the sole official language.

In the United States, Spanish is spoken by three-quarters of its 41.3 million Hispanic population. It is also being learned and spoken by a small, though slowly growing, proportion of its non-Hispanic population for its increasing use in business, commerce, and both domestic and international politics. Spanish does hold co-official status in the state of New Mexico, and in the unincorporated U.S. territory of Puerto Rico. See Spanish in the United States for further information.

In Brazil, Spanish has obtained an important status as a second language among young students and many skilled professionals. In recent years, with Brazil decreasing its reliance on trade with the USA and Europe and increasing trade and ties with its Spanish-speaking neighbours (especially as a member of the Mercosur trading bloc), much stress has been placed on bilingualism and Spanish proficiency in the country (the same is true of Portuguese proficiency in neighbouring countries). On July 07 2005, the National Congress of Brazil gave final approval to a bill that makes Spanish a mandatory foreign language in the country’s public and private primary schools [2]. The close genetic relationship between the two languages, along with the fact that Spanish is the dominant and official language of almost every country that borders Brazil, adds to the popularity. Standard Spanish and Ladino (Judæo-Spanish spoken by Sephardic Jews) may also be spoken natively by some Spanish-descended Brazilians, immigrant workers from neighbouring Spanish-speaking countries and Brazilian Sephardim respectively, who have maintained it as their home language. Additionally, in Brazil's border states that have authority over their educational systems, Spanish has been taught for years. In many other border towns and villages (especially along the Uruguayo-Brazilian border) a mixed language commonly known as Portuñol is also spoken.

In European countries other than Spain, it may be spoken by some of their Spanish-speaking immigrant communities, primarily in Andorra (where it is spoken by a great part of the population, despite having no official status), the Netherlands, Italy, France, Germany and the United Kingdom where there is a strong community in London. There has been a sharp increase in the popularity of Spanish in the United Kingdom over the last few years. It is spoken by much of the population of Gibraltar, though English remains the only official language. Yanito, an English-Spanish mixed language is also spoken.

Among the countries and territories in Oceania, Spanish is the seventh most spoken language in Australia; where there is a strong community in Sydney. It is also spoken by the approximately 3,000 inhabitants of Easter Island, a territorial possession of Chile. The island nations of Guam, Palau, Northern Marianas, Marshall Islands and Federated States of Micronesia all once had Spanish speakers, but Spanish has long since been forgotten, and now only exists as an influence on the local native languages.

In Asia the Spanish language has long been in decline. Spanish ceased to be an official language of the Philippines in 1987, and it is now spoken by less than 0.01% of the population; 2,658 speakers (1990 Census). However, the sole existing Spanish-Asiatic creole language, Chabacano, is also spoken by an additional 0.4% of the Filipino population; 292,630 (1990 census). Most other Philippine languages contain generous quantities of Spanish loan words. Among other Asian countries, Spanish may also be spoken by pockets of ex-immigrant communities, such as Mexican-born ethnic Chinese deported to China or third and fourth generation ethnic Japanese Peruvians returning to their ancestral homeland of Japan.

In the Middle East and North Africa, small Spanish-speaking communities exist in Israel (both standard Spanish and Ladino), northern Morocco (both standard Spanish and Ladino), Turkey (Ladino), and the Spanish enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla which are politically part of Spain.

In North America and the Caribbean, Spanish is also spoken by segments of the populations in Aruba, Canada (mainly in Toronto and Montreal), Netherlands Antilles (mainly on Bonaire, Curaçao and St. Maarten), Trinidad and Tobago, and the U.S. Virgin Islands (mainly on St. Croix).

In Antarctica, the territorial claims and permanent bases made by Argentina, Chile, Peru, Uruguay and Spain also place Spanish as the official and working language of these enclaves.

Variations

Main article: Spanish dialects and varieties

There are important variations among the various regions of Spain and Spanish-speaking America. In Spain the North Castilian dialect pronunciation is commonly taken as the national standard (although the characteristic weak pronouns usage or laísmo of this dialect is deprecated).

Spanish has three second-person singular pronouns: tú, usted, and in some parts of Latin America, vos (the use of this form is called voseo). Generally speaking, tú and vos are informal and used with friends (though in Spain vos is considered a highly exalted archaism that is now confined to liturgy). Usted is universally regarded as the formal form, and is used as a mark of respect, as when addressing one's elders or strangers. The pronoun vosotros is the plural form of tú in most of Spain, although in the Americas (and some particular southern-Spain cities such as Cádiz) it is replaced with ustedes. It is remarkable that the informal use of ustedes in southern Spain does not keep the proper pronoun-verb agreement: while the formal form of "you go" would be ustedes van, in Cádiz the informal form would be constructed as ustedes vais, making use of the second person of the plural instead of the third (which constitutes the formal construction).

Vos is used extensively as the primary spoken form of the second-person singular pronoun in various countries around Latin America, including Argentina, Costa Rica, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Paraguay, and Uruguay. In Argentina, Uruguay, and increasingly in Paraguay, is it also the standard form used in the media, whereas media in other voseante countries continue to use usted or tú. Vos may also be present in other countries as a limited regionalism. Its use, depending on country and region, can be considered the accepted standard or reproached as sub-standard and considered as speech of the ignorant and uneducated. The interpersonal situations in which the employment of vos is acceptable may also differ considerably between regions.

Spanish forms also differ regarding second-person plural pronouns. The Spanish dialects of Latin America have only one form of the second-person plural; ustedes (formal/familiar). Meanwhile, in Spain there are two; ustedes (formal) and vosotros (familiar/informal).

The RAE (Real Academia Española), in association with twenty-one other national language academies, exercises a controlling influence through its publication of dictionaries and widely respected grammar guides and style guides. In part due to this influence, and also because of other socio-historical reasons, a neutral standardized form of the language (Standard Spanish) is widely acknowledged for use in literature, academic contexts and the media.

Grammar

Main article: Spanish grammar

Spanish is a relatively inflected language, with a two-gender system and about fifty conjugated forms per verb, but small noun declension and limited pronominal declension. (For a detailed overview of verbs, see Spanish verbs and Spanish irregular verbs.)

As for syntax, the unmarked sentence word order is Subject Verb Object, though variations are common. Spanish is right-branching, using prepositions, and with adjectives generally coming after nouns.

Spanish is also pro-drop (allows the deletion of pronouns when pragmatically unnecessary) and verb-framed.

Sounds

Main article: Spanish phonology

The consonantal system of Castilian Spanish, by the 16th century, underwent the following important changes that differentiated it from some nearby Romance languages, such as Portuguese and Catalan:

• The initial /f/, that had evolved into a vacillating /h/, was lost in most words (although this etymological h- has been preserved in spelling).
• The voiced labiodental fricative /v/ (that was written u or v) merged with the bilabial oclusive /b/ (written b). Orthographically, b and v do not correspond to different phonemes in contemporary Spanish, excepting some areas in Spain, particularly the ones influenced by Catalan/Valencian and some Andalusia.
• The voiced alveolar fricative /z/ (that was written s between vowels) merged with the voiceless /s/ (that was written s, or ss between vowels).
• The voiced alveolar affricate /dz/ (that was written z) merged with the voiceless /ts/ (that was written ç, ce, ci), and then /ts/ evolved into the interdental /θ/, now written z, ce, ci. But in Andalucia, the Canary Islands and the Americas these sounds merged with /s/ as well. Notice that the ç or c with cedilla was in its origin a Spanish letter, although is no longer used.
• The voiced postalveolar fricative /ʒ/ (that was written j, ge, gi) merged with the voiceless /ʃ/ (that was written x, as in Quixote), and then /ʃ/ evolved by the 17th century into the modern velar sound /x/, now written j, ge, gi.

The consonantal system of Medieval Spanish has been better preserved in Ladino, the language spoken by the descendants of the Sephardic Jews who were expelled from Spain in the 15th century.

Lexical stress

Spanish has a phonemic stress system — the place where stress will fall cannot be predicted by other features of the word, and two words can differ by just a change in stress. For example, the word camino (with penultimate stress) means "road" or "I walk" whereas caminó (with final stress) means "he/she/it walked". Also, since Spanish syllables are all pronounced at a more or less constant tempo, the language is said to be syllable-timed.

Writing system

Main article: Writing system of Spanish

The pronunciation of any Spanish word can be perfectly predicted from its written form.

Spanish is written using the Latin alphabet, with the addition of ñ (eñe). Ch(che) and ll also have their own places in the alphabet (a, b, c, ch, d, ..., l, ll, m, n, ñ, ...). Since 1994, however, words containing the letters ch and ll have been alphabetized as though spelled with the separate letters c - h and l - l.

The letter u sometimes carries diaeresis (ü) after the letter g, and stressed vowels carry acute accents (á) in many words. These marks usually indicate deviations from what would be expected if one followed the customary rules of Spanish orthography. For example, gue indicates that the g is hard before the e sound. However, güe means that the u is also pronounced (in this case, with the w sound. Accent marks usually indicate that the customary rules of accentuation (stress the last syllable of any word ending in a consonant (including y) other than n or s; stress the next to last syllable otherwise) are to be ignored. In a few cases, an accented letter is used to distinguish meaning, however: compare el (= the before a masculine singular noun) with él (= he or it). Words that could otherwise be mistaken for function words are often given accents (such as "té," tea, or "dé" and "sé," forms of "dar" and either "saber" or "ser,' respectively). Interrogative pronouns (que, cual, donde, quien, etc.) sometimes recieve accents when in questions or indirect questions. Some writers give demonstrative pronouns (ese, este, aquel, etc.) accents when they refer to a specific, implied object. In addition, o (= or) is written with an accent between numerals to indicate that it is not part of the numerals: e.g., 10 ó 20 should be read as diéz o veinte rather than diez mil veinte. Accent marks are frequently omitted on capital letters.

Exclamatory and interrogative clauses begin with inverted question and exclamation marks.

Examples of Spanish

Note, the third column uses the International Phonetic Alphabet, the standard for linguists, to transcribe the sounds. There are several examples of travellers' vocabulary and one literary reference.

You can listen to these words being read out. Both the transcription and the recording represent standard Castilian pronunciation.

El Ingenioso Hidalgo Don Quixote de la Mancha, Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra (opening sentence).

See also

• Real Academia Española
• Common phrases in Spanish
• List of English words of Spanish origin
• Names given to the Spanish language
• Spanish proverbs
• Spanish language poets
• Spanish-based creole languages
• Spanish profanity
• Portuñol
• Papiamento, Chavacano language, Spanglish, Yanito, Palenquero
• Rock en español
• Latin Union
• Islenos

Local varieties

• Andalusian Spanish
• Argentine Spanish
• Chilean Spanish
• Colombian Spanish
• Cuban Spanish
• Mexican Spanish
• Panamanian Spanish
• Puerto Rican Spanish
• Rioplatense Spanish
• Spanish in the United States
• Spanish in the Philippines
• Venezuelan Spanish
• Central American Spanish

External links

About the Spanish language

• Spanish at About.com
• Official page of the RAE (in Spanish)
• Ethnologue report for Spanish
• Spanish Language & Linguistics Website
• PDF: A history of the Spanish language
• Numbers of speakers by countries
• Why learn Spanish? 10 reasons for learning Spanish
• Spanish Language Collection of lessons and other resources
• Spanish evolution from Latin
• Spanish Language Characteristics Some characteristics of Spanish Language
• Learn Spanish Spanish Forum for learning and exploring the Spanish language, with help from volunteer teachers from all over the world.

Dictionaries

• DRAE, Dictionary of the RAE (Spanish-spanish)
• Spanish — English Dictionary: from Webster's Rosetta Edition.
• Diccionarios.com
• An English-Spanish Dictionary
• Tododiccionarios.com a directory of reference works in English or Spanish, classified by subject, with several thousand links.
• Spanishdict.com Another Spanish-English dictionary.
• Wordreference.com Comprehensive Spanish-English-Spanish dictionary.
• Tomísimo.org A Spanish-English dictionary.
• Diccionarios en internet Dictionaries in Spanish, English, etc.

Grammatical help

• Spanish grammar Wikibook
• Spanish Grammar Tutorial - with quizzes, tests, and oral activities
• Usage of Tenses
• Use of written accent marks in Spanish
• Spanish Verb Forms — Search and conjugate Spanish verbs.
• Learn Spanish Grammar and more. Examples, Uses, Explanations of Grammar Points and a Free Personal Spanish Verb Trainer-Conjugator.

Tutorials

• Spanish vocabulary learning software with audio
• Spanish for beginners and travelers
• Free Learno.com online Spanish tutorial
• Practice Spanish Online with Audio Stories
• StudySpanish.com Popular website for beginners
• Rioplatense Spanish Spanish from the Río de la Plata basin
• Spanish-kit.net Free Downloadable Spanish grammars, and vocabulary learning tools.
• Fridaspanish.com Learn Spanish Mexican Spanish
• Free Spanish Language Tutorial at ielanguages.com
• Free Spanish quizzes with audio by a native speaker
• SpaniCity Free Spanish lessons, sounds, grammar and dictionary
• Learn and listen to useful expressions in Spanish Each expression is presented with an audio recording and an illustration
• Spanish phrasebook on Wikitravel

Resources

• Spanish Blogs & Weblog Directory
• Language Exchange - Learn and practise Spanish
• Independent directory of 550 Spanish schools, free online exercises and verb conjugatoraf:Spaans

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