Spanish language

Spanish or Castilian (castellano) is a  originally from the northern area of. From there, its use gradually spread inside the Kingdom of, where it evolved and eventually became the principal language of the government and trade. It was later taken to, the and  in the last five centuries by Spanish explorers and colonists.

Today, it is one of the official languages of Spain, most countries, and. In total, 21 nations use Spanish as their primary language. Spanish is also one of of the.

The language is spoken by between 322 and 400 million people natively, making Spanish the most spoken Romance language and possibly the second most spoken language by number of native speakers.

is the world's largest Spanish-speaking country. Spanish is the second most widely spoken language in the and by far the most popular studied foreign language in  schools and universities. Spanish is among the most popular foreign languages for study in the rest of the nations of the in general, where on top of the widespread use of  globally, the large number of additional countries and geographic territory that Spanish allows exploring is an attractive prospect for many people. Due to proximity, linguistic similarities, and trade reasons it is also a very popular second language in Italy, Portugal, and particularly the southern states of Brazil. It is estimated that the combined total of native and non-native Spanish speakers is approximately 500 million, likely making it the fourth most spoken language by total number of speakers. statistics for 2007 show Spanish as the third most commonly used language on the internet, after English and Chinese.

Spanish is the third most influential language in the world (after and ).

Naming and origin
Spaniards tend to call this language español (Spanish) when contrasting it with languages of other states, such as and, but call it castellano (Castilian), that is, the language of the  region, when contrasting it with other  such as , , and. This reasoning also holds true for the language's preferred name in some n countries. In this manner, the uses the term castellana to define the  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 vice-versa, to refer to that variety of Spanish which is considered as standard in the region.



Classification and related languages
Castilian Spanish has closest affinity to the other Romance languages:  (asturianu),  (galego),  (dzhudezmo/spanyol/kasteyano), and  (português), as well as to  (aragonés) and  (català).

Catalan, an which exhibits many  traits, is more similar to the neighbouring  (occitan) than to Spanish, or indeed than Spanish and Portuguese are to each other. In the Middle Ages, it was even known as llemosí (Limousin). In later centuries it was generally regarded as a dialect of Spanish, and it wasn't until the earliest years of the 20th century that Catalan was recognised as a variant of the Occitan language.

Spanish and Portuguese share similar grammars and a majority of vocabulary as well as a common history of while a great part of the peninsula was under  (both languages expanded over ). Their has been estimated as 89%. See, for further information.

Ladino
Ladino, which is essentially medieval Castilian and closer to modern Spanish than any other language, is spoken by many descendants of the who were. In many ways it is not a separate language but a parallel dialect of Castilian. Ladino lacks which was influential during the, and it retains many archaic features which have since been lost in standard Castilian. It does, however, contain other vocabulary which is not found in standard Castilian, including vocabulary from as well as  and other languages spoken wherever the  settled.

Vocabulary comparison
Spanish and share a very similar phonological system and do not differ very much in grammar. At present, the with Italian is estimated at 82%. As a result, Spanish and Italian are mutually intelligible to various degrees. The lexical similarity with is even greater, 89%, but the vagaries of Portuguese pronunciation make it less easily understood by Hispanophones than Italian. with and  is even lower (lexical similarity being respectively 75% and 71% ): 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.


 * 1) also nós outros in early modern Portuguese (e.g. )
 * 2) noi altri in Southern
 * 3) nous autres in

History


The Spanish language developed from, with major during the ian period, and minor surviving influences from  and , and to some extent the  via the. Spanish developed along the remote cross road strips among the, , and  provinces of Northern Spain, partly as strongly innovative and differing variant from its nearest cousin, , with a higher degree of Basque influence in these regions(see ). Typical features of Spanish diachronical include  (Latin vita, Spanish vida),  (Latin annum, Spanish año, and Latin anellum, Spanish anillo) and ation (-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.

During the, this northern dialect from was carried south, and indeed is still a  in the northern coastal regions of.

The first Latin to Spanish grammar (Gramática de la Lengua Castellana) was written in, Spain, in 1492 by. When 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, "Your highness, the language is the instrument of the Empire."

From the 16th century onwards, the language was brought to the and  by. Also in this epoch, Spanish became the main language of Politics and Art across the major part of Europe. In the 18th century, took its place.

In the 20th century, Spanish was introduced in and  and parts of the United States, such as  in, that had not been part of the Spanish Empire.

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

Typical sound changes
One defining characteristic of Spanish was the ization of the Latin short vowels e and o into ie and ue, respectively, when they were stressed. Similar can be found in other Romance languages, but in Spanish they were particularly significant. Some examples:


 * Lat. petra > Sp. piedra, It. pietra, Fr. pierre, Port./Gal. pedra "stone".
 * Lat. moritur > Sp. muere, It. muore, Fr. meurt / muert, Rom. moare, Port./Gal. morre "die".

More peculiar to early Spanish (as in the dialect of Occitan, and possibly due to a Basque ) was the mutation of Latin initial f- into h- whenever it was followed by a vowel which did not diphthongate. Compare for instance:


 * Lat. filium > It. figlio, Port. filho, Gal. fillo, Fr. fils, Occitan filh (but Gascon hilh) Sp. hijo (but Ladino fijo);
 * late Lat. *fabulare > Lad. favlar, Port./Gal. falar, Sp. hablar;
 * but Lat. focum > It. fuoco, Port./Gal. fogo, Sp./Lad. fuego.

Some s of Latin also produced characteristically different results in these languages, for example:


 * Lat. clamare, acc. flammam, plenum > Lad. lyamar, flama, pleno; Sp. llamar, llama, lleno. However, in Spanish there are also the forms clamar, flama, pleno; Port. chamar, chama, cheio; Gal. chamar, chama, cheo.
 * Lat. acc. octo, noctem, multum > Lad. ocho, noche, muncho; Sp. ocho, noche, mucho; Port. oito, noite, muito; Gal. oito, noite, moito.

Geographic distribution
Spanish is one of the official languages of the, the , the , the , and the.

Latin America
The vast majority of Spanish speakers are located in. Of most countries with the largest numbers of Spanish speakers, only is situated outside of the Americas. boasts the world's largest number of native speakers. At the national level, Spanish is the official language of, (co-official  and ), , , , , , , , , , , , ,  (co-official  ),  (co-official  and, in some regions, ), , and. Spanish is also the official language (co-official language ) in the U.S. commonwealth of.

The non-Spanish speaking Americas
Spanish holds no official recognition in the former of. However, according to the 2000 census, 52.1% of the population speaks the language "very well." It is mainly spoken by Hispanic descendants who have remained in the region since the 17th century. However, English remains the sole official language.

Spanish has become increasingly important in due to proximity and increased trade with its Spanish-speaking neighbours, for example, as a member of the  trading bloc. In 2005, the approved a bill, signed into law by the, that makes Spanish available as a foreign language in the country's secondary schools. In many border towns and villages (especially along the Uruguayan-Brazilian border) a commonly known as  is also spoken.

In, is one of two official languages, but it is spoken by only about 10% of the population. All Haitians speak, the country's other official language. The latter, is a based primarily on French and African languages, with some, ,  and  influences. Spanish, though not official, is spoken by a growing amount of the population. It is spoken more frequently near the border with the, however Spanish is increasingly being spoken in more westward areas, as , , and trade influence Haitian society, and Haiti becomes increasingly involved in Latin American affairs.

In the, 42.7 million people were of heritage according to the 2005 census. Some 32 million people, or 12% of the whole population aged 5 years or older speak Spanish at home. The Spanish language has a (many states in the South contain land that used to be part of Mexico or other Spanish colonies) and has recently been revitalised by heavy immigration from Spanish-speaking Latin America. Spanish, moreover, is the most widely taught foreign language in the United States. Though the United States has no formally designated "official languages", Spanish is formally recognized at the state level, alongside English, in the U.S. state of, where it is spoken by almost 30% of the population. In total, the U.S. contains the world's fifth-largest Spanish speaking population.

Europe
Spanish is official in, the country for which it is named and from which it originated. It is also spoken widely in, although is used for official purposes. Likewise, it is spoken in though  is the official language. It is also spoken by small communities in other European countries, such as the, , and. Spanish is an official language of the. In Switzerland, Spanish is the of 1.7% of the population, representing the first minority after the 4 official languages of the country.

Asia
Although Spanish was an official language in the, it was never spoken by a majority of the population. Its importance fell in the first half of the 20th century following the US occupation and administration of the islands. The introduction of the English language in the Filipino government system put an end to the use of Spanish as the official language. The language lost its status in 1987, during the administration. According to the 1990 census, there were 2,658 native speakers of Spanish. The number of Spanish speakers, however, are not available in the ensuing 1995 and 2000 censuses. Additionally, according to the 2000 census, there are over 600,000 native speakers of, a Spanish based spoken in  and. Many have numerous Spanish loanwords. See also:.

Africa
In Africa, Spanish language is official in the UN-recognised but Moroccan-occupied (co-official ) and  (co-official  and ). Today, nearly 200,000 refugee Sahrawis are able to read and write in Spanish, and several thousands have received education in foreign countries as part of aid packages (mainly  and ). In Equatorial Guinea, Spanish is the predominant language when counting native and non-native speakers (around 500,000 people), while  is the most spoken language by number of native speakers,. It is also spoken in the Spanish cities in ( and ) and in the autonomous community of  (143,000 and 1,995,833 people, respectively). Within Northern Morocco, a former that is also geographically close to Spain, approximately 20,000 people speak Spanish. . It is spoken by some communities of, because of the Cuban influence from the. In and, the Spanish can be learned as a second foreign language in the public educative system. . In 2008, s centers will be opened in and, the first one in the

Oceania
Among the countries and territories in, Spanish is also spoken in , a territorial possession of Chile. According to the 2001 census, there are approximately 95,000 speakers of Spanish in Australia, 44,000 of which live in Greater Sydney.

The island nations of, , , and  all once had Spanish speakers, since  and  were Spanish colonial possessions until late 19th century (see ), but Spanish has since been forgotten. It now only exists as an influence on the local native languages.

Variations


There are important variations among the regions of Spain and throughout Spanish-speaking America. In countries in Hispanophone America it is preferable to use the word castellano to distinguish their version of the language from that of Spain, thus asserting their autonomy and national identity. In Spain the Castilian dialect's pronunciation is commonly regarded as the national standard, although a use of slightly different pronouns called of this dialect is deprecated. More accurately, for nearly everyone in Spain, "standard Spanish" means "pronouncing everything exactly as it is written", an ideal which does not correspond to any real dialect, though the northern dialects get the closest to it. In practice, the standard way of speaking Spanish in the media is "written Spanish" for formal speech, "Madrid dialect" (one of the transitional variants between Castilian and Andalusian) for informal speech.

Spanish has three  s: 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 an archaic form for address of exalted personages, its use now mainly confined to the ). Usted is universally regarded as the formal address (derived from vuestra merced, "your grace"), and is used as a mark of respect, as when addressing one's elders or strangers.

Vos is used extensively as the primary spoken form of the second-person singular pronoun in many countries of, including , , the central mountain region of , the State of Chiapas in Mexico, , , , , , , the and Valle del Cauca  of  and the  of  in. In Argentina, Uruguay, and increasingly in Paraguay, it is also the standard form used in the, but the media in other countries with voseo generally continue to use usted or tú except in advertisements, for instance. Vos may also be used regionally in other countries. Depending on country or region, usage may be considered standard or (by better educated speakers) to be unrefined. Interpersonal situations in which the use of vos is acceptable may also differ considerably between regions. For further information, see .

Spanish forms also differ regarding second-person plural pronouns. The Spanish dialects of Latin America have only one form of the second-person plural for daily use, ustedes (formal or familiar, as the case may be, though vosotros non-formal usage can sometimes appear in poetry and rhetorical or literary style). In Spain there are two forms &mdash; ustedes (formal) and vosotros (familiar). The pronoun vosotros is the plural form of tú in most of Spain, but in the Americas (and certain southern Spanish cities such as or, and in the ) it is replaced with ustedes. It is remarkable that the use of ustedes for the informal plural "you" in southern Spain does not follow the usual rule for pronoun-verb ; e.g., while the formal form for "you go", ustedes van, uses the third-person plural form of the verb, in Cádiz or Seville the informal form is constructed as ustedes vais, using the second-person plural of the verb. In the Canary Islands, though, the usual pronoun-verb agreement is preserved in most cases.

Some words can be different, even embarrassingly so, in different Hispanophone countries. Most Spanish speakers can recognize other Spanish forms, even in places where they are not commonly used, but Spaniards generally do not recognise specifically American usages. For example, Spanish mantequilla, aguacate and albaricoque (respectively, "butter", "avocado", "apricot") correspond to manteca, palta, and damasco, respectively, in Argentina, Chile and Uruguay. The everyday Spanish words coger (to catch, get, or pick up), pisar (to step on) and concha (seashell) are considered extremely rude in parts of Latin America, where the meaning of coger and pisar is also "to have sex" and concha means "vulva". The Puerto Rican word for "bobby pin" (pinche) is an obscenity in Mexico, and in simply means "stingy". Other examples include , which means "swearword" in Spain but is known to the rest of the world as the Mexican foodstuff. Pija in many countries of Latin America is an obscene slang word for "penis", while in the word also signifies "posh girl" or "snobby". Coche, which means "car" in Spain, means "pig" in Guatemala while carro means "car" in some Latin American countries and "cart" in others, as well as in Spain.

The (Royal Spanish Academy), together with the 21 other national ones (see ), exercises a standardizing influence through its publication of dictionaries and widely respected grammar and style guides. Due to this influence and for other sociohistorical reasons, a standardized form of the language is widely acknowledged for use in literature, academic contexts and the media.

Writing system
Spanish is written using the, with the addition of the character  (eñe, representing the phoneme , a letter distinct from n, although typographically composed of an n with a ) and the s ch (che, representing the phoneme , a letter distinct from c and h) and ll (elle, representing the phoneme , a letter distinct from l). However, the digraph rr (erre fuerte, "strong r", erre doble, "double r", or simply erre), which also represents a single phoneme, is not similarly regarded as a single letter. Thus, the traditional Spanish alphabet has 28 letters (29 if one counts w, which is only used in foreign names and loanwords):


 * a, b, c, ch, d, e, f, g, h, i, j, k, l, ll, m, n, ñ, o, p, q, r, s, t, u, v, w, x, y, z.

Since 1994, the digraphs ch and ll are to be treated as letter pairs for purposes only. Words with ch are now alphabetically sorted between those with ce and ci, instead of following cz as they used to, and similarly for ll, although ch and ll remain otherwise distinct letters. All words that start with the rr sound are written with only one r and collated under this letter. There are no words that start with the r sound.

With the exclusion of a very small number of regional terms such as México (see Mexico: Toponymy), pronunciation can be entirely determined from spelling. A typical Spanish word is stressed on the before the last if it ends with a vowel (not including y) or with a vowel followed by n or s; it is stressed on the last syllable otherwise. Exceptions to this rule are indicated by placing an on the.

The acute accent is used, in addition, to distinguish between certain s, especially when one of them is a stressed word and the other one is a : compare el ("the", masculine singular definite article) with él ("he" or "it"), or te ("you", object pronoun), de (preposition "of" or "from"), and se (reflexive pronoun) with té ("tea"), dé ("give") and sé ("I know", or imperative "be").

The interrogative pronouns (qué, cuál, dónde, quién, etc.) also receive accents in direct or indirect questions, and some demonstratives (ése, éste, aquél, etc.) can be accented when used as pronouns. The conjunction o ("or") is written with an accent between numerals so as not to be confused with a zero: e.g., 10 ó 20 should be read as diez o veinte rather than diez mil veinte ("10,020"). Accent marks are frequently omitted in capital letters (a widespread practice in the early days of computers where only lowercase vowels were available with accents), although the advises against this.

When u is written between g and a front vowel (e or i), if it should be pronounced, it is written with a (ü) to indicate that it is not silent as it normally would be (e.g., cigüeña, "stork", is pronounced }}; if it were written cigueña, it would be pronounced.

Interrogative and exclamatory clauses are introduced with.

Sounds
The phonemic inventory listed in the following table includes s that are preserved only in some dialects, other dialects have merged them (such as ); these are marked with an asterisk (*). Sounds in parentheses are s.

By the 16th century, the consonant system of Spanish underwent the following important changes that differentiated it from such as  and :


 * Initial, when it had evolved into a vacillating , was lost in most words (although this etymological h- is preserved in spelling and in some Andalusian dialects is still aspirated).
 * The  (which was written u or v) merged with the bilabial oclusive  (written b). There is no difference between the pronunciation of orthographic b and v in contemporary Spanish, excepting specific areas in Spain (particularly the ones influenced by ) and Latin America (notably ).
 * The  which existed as a separate phoneme in medieval Spanish merged with its voiceless counterpart . The phoneme which resulted from this merger is currently spelled s.
 * The  merged with its voiceless counterpart, which evolved into the modern velar sound  by the 17th century, now written with j, or g before e, i. Nevertheless, in most parts of Argentina and in Uruguay, y and ll have both evolved to  or.
 * The  merged with its voiceless counterpart, which then developed into the interdental , now written z, or c before e, i. But in , the  and the Americas this sound merged with  as well. See , for further information.

The consonant system of Medieval Spanish has been better preserved in and in Portuguese, neither of which underwent these shifts.

Lexical stress
Spanish syllables are all pronounced at a more or less constant tempo, so it is sometimes said to be, but in fact it is , with different stress patterns resulting in separate meanings for the same spelling, distinguishable by written accents, especially noticeable in verb conjugations. For example, the word camino (with penultimate stress) means "road" or "I walk" whereas caminó (with final stress) means "you (formal)/he/she/it walked". Another example is the word práctico (first-syllable stress) "practical", which is different from practico (second-syllable stress) "I practice", and practicó (last-syllable stress) "you (formal)/he/she/it practiced." As mentioned above, stress can always be predicted from the written form of a word. An amusing example of the significance of stress and intonation in Spanish is the riddle cómo cómo como como como como, to be punctuated and accented so that it makes sense. The answer is ''¿Cómo "cómo como"? ¡Como como como!'' ("What do you mean / 'how / do I eat'? / I eat / the way / I eat!").

Grammar
Spanish is a relatively language, with a two- system and about fifty  forms per, but limited inflection of s, s, and s. (For a detailed overview of verbs, see  and .)

It is, uses s, and usually, though not always, places s after s. Its is generally , though variations are common. It is a (allows the deletion of pronouns when pragmatically unnecessary) and.

Local varieties