Spanish language

This article is about the international language known as Spanish or Castilian. For other languages spoken in Spain see Languages of Spain.

Spanish or Castilian is an Iberian Romance language, and the third most widely spoken language in the world. It is spoken as a first language by about 352 million people, or by 417 million including non-native speakers (according to 1999 estimates).

"Spanish" or "Castilian"

Main article: Names given to the Spanish language

Spaniards tend to call this language español (Spanish) 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). 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, Chile, Peru and Uruguay. Some philologists use Castilian only when speaking of the language spoken in Castile during the middle ages, stating that it’s 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

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

History

Main article: History of the Spanish language

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 breve E/O from vulgar Latin (Latin terra, Spanish tierra; Latin novus, Spanish nuevo). Similar phenomena can be found in most Romance languages as well, although Spanish has a stronger Celtic influence than Italian or French, especially in its distinctive lenition.

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, ¿Para qué quiero una obra como ésta si ya conozco el idioma?, "What do I want a work like this for, if I already know the language?", to which he replied, Señora, la lengua es el instrumento del Imperio, "Ma'am, the language is the instrument of the Empire."

From the 16th century on, the language was brought to America, 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.

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

Geographic distribution

Spanish language
Names for the language History Pronunciation Dialects Alphabet Grammar: Determiners Nouns Pronouns Adjectives Prepositions Verbs Conjugation Irregular verbs

Spanish is one of the official languages of the United Nations, the European Union and the African Union. The majority of its speakers are confined to the Western Hemisphere, Europe and the Spanish territories in Africa (Canary Islands, Ceuta and Melilla).

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 (c. 30 million).

Spanish is the official and most important language in 20 countries: Argentina, Bolivia (co-official Quechua and Aymará), 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), Spain (co-official Catalan/Valencian, Galician and Basque), Uruguay, Venezuela, and Western Sahara (co-official Arabic).

It is an important and widely-spoken language, but without official recognition, in Andorra and Belize.

It is spoken by much of the population of the British overseas territory of Gibraltar (which is also claimed by Spain), though English remains the most widely used and only official language. Yanito, an English-Spanish mixed language is also spoken.

In the United States, Spanish is spoken by some three-quarters of its over 40 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, where virtually the entire population speaks Portuguese, Spanish has obtained an important status as a second language among young students and many skilled professionals. In recent years when Brazil has decreased its reliance on trade with the USA and Europe, and has increased trade and ties with its Spanish-speaking neighbours (especially as a member of the Mercosur trading bloc), much stress has been place on bilingualism and Spanish proficiency in the country. On July 07, 2005, the National Congress of Brazil gave final approval to a bill that makes Spanish a second language in the country’s public and private primary schools. [1] 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 the language of the home. Additionally, in Brazil's border states that have authority over their educational systems Spanish has in fact 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.

Spanish is also spoken by segments of the populations in Aruba, Canada, Israel (both standard Spanish and Ladino), northern Morocco (both standard Spanish and Ladino), Netherlands Antilles, Trinidad and Tobago, Turkey (Ladino), the U.S. Virgin Islands, and Western Sahara.

In European countries other than Spain and Andorra, it may be spoken by some of their Spanish-speaking immigrant communities, primarily in the Netherlands, Italy, France, Germany and the United Kingdom.

Among the countries and territories in Oceania, Spanish is the seventh most spoken language after English in Australia, where in the 2001 Australian Census, of the persons who reported they spoke a language other than English at home, around 97,000 reported Spanish. 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 Antarctic, the territorial claims and permanent bases made by Argentina, Chile, Peru 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.

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, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Paraguay and Uruguay, although only in Argentina, Uruguay, and increasingly in Paraguay, is it also the standard written form. 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, Castilian Spanish of Spain has two; ustedes (formal) and vosotros (familiar/informal).

The RAE (Real Academia Española), in association with twenty-one other national language academies, exercises a prudent influence through its publication of dictionaries and widely respected grammar guides and style guides.

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 possible. Spanish is right-branching, using prepositions, and with adjectives generally coming after nouns.

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

Phonology

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, Valencian 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 pronounces all syllables at a more or less constant tempo, it is said to be a syllable-timed language.

Writing system

Spanish is written using the Latin alphabet, with a few special letters: the vowels can be marked with an acute accent (á, é, í, ó, ú) to mark stress when it does not follow the normal pattern or to differentiate otherwise equally spelt words (see below); u (ü) with diaeresis —not to be confused with umlaut— after g to indicate that it should be pronounced [gw]; and n with tilde (ñ) to indicate the palatal nasal [ɲ]. Traditionally, the digraph rr was considered a separate letter, but this is no longer the case; the digraphs ch and ll have been considered separate letters since 1803 (see the DRAE for the entries on ch and ll). However, in 1994, the tenth congress of the Association of Spanish Language Academies agreed to sort ch and ll as ordinary pairs of letters by request of UNESCO and other international organizations, while keeping them as distinct letters for other purposes. Thus for example ch, instead of being sorted between c and d as formerly, now comes between ce and ci.

Written Spanish precedes exclamatory and interrogative clauses with inverted question and exclamation marks, examples: ¿Qué dices? (What do you mean?) ¡No es verdad! (It's not true!). This feature provides an immediate understanding of a written sentence's sense from its very beginning. Spanish is one of the few languages whose written form does so.

Written Spanish also marks unequivocally stress through a series of orthographic rules. The default stress is on the final syllable when the word ends in any consonant other than -n or -s and on the penultimate (next-to-last) syllable on words that end in a vowel, n or s. Words that do not follow the default stress have an acute accent over the stressed vowel.

A word with final stress is called oxytone, (aguda in traditional Spanish grammar texts); a word with penultimate stress is called paroxytone (llana or grave); a word with antepenultimate stress (stress on the third last syllable) is called proparoxytone (esdrújula). A word with preantepenultimate stress (on the fourth last syllable) or earlier does not have a common linguistic term in English, but in Spanish receives the name sobresdrújula. All proparoxtyones and sobresdrújulas have written accent marks.

Also, in a number of cases, homonyms are distinguished with written accents on the stressed (or only) syllable: for example, te (informal object case of "you") and té ("tea"); se (third person reflexive) and sé ("I know" or imperative "be"); tu (informal "your") and tú (informal subject case of "you").

These rules are similar, but not the same, as those of Portuguese and Catalan.

Spanish orthography is such that every speaker can guess the pronunciation (adapted for accent) from the written form.

While the same pronunciation could be misspelt in several ways — there are homophones, because of the language's silent h, vacillations between b and v, and between c and z (and between c, z, and s in Latin America and some parts of the Peninsula) — the orthography is far more coherent than, say, English orthography.

In spite of that, there have been several initiatives to reform the spelling: Andrés Bello succeeded in making his proposal official in several South American countries, but they later returned to the RAE standard. Another initiative, the O.RR.L.I., remained a curiosity. Juan Ramón Jiménez proposed changing -ge- and -gi to -je- and ji, but this is only applied in editions of his works or his wife's. Gabriel García Márquez raised the issue of reform during a congress at Zacatecas, but, with all his prestige, he got attention but nothing going. The Academies however from time to time change several tidbits.

Spanish is nicknamed la lengua de Cervantes (the language of Cervantes, the author of Don Quixote).

Examples of Spanish

Wikimedia Commons has more media related to:

Spanish language

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
• Spanish proverbs
• Spanish language poets
• Spanish Creole
• Rioplatense Spanish
• Portuñol
• Papiamento, Chavacano language, Spanglish, Yanito, Palenquero
• Spanish in the United States
• Spanish in the Philippines
• Rock en español
• Latin Union

External links

Wikibooks has more about this subject:

Spanish language

Spanish language edition of Wikipedia

About the Spanish language

• 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
• Spanish evolution from Latin
• Spanish Language Characteristics Some characteristics of Spanish Language

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.
• Diccionario Turco - Español — español-turco en línea, contiene frases de ejemplo

Grammatical help

• Spanish grammar Wikibook
• Usage of Tenses
• Use of written accent marks in Spanish
• Spanish Verb Forms — Search and conjugate Spanish verbs.

Tutorials

• Free Learno.com online Spanish tutorial
• Spanish tutorials and Quizzes
• StudySpanish.com Popular website for beginners
• Rioplatense Spanish Spanish from the River Plate basin
• Spanish-kit.net Free Downloadable Spanish grammars, and vocabulary learning tools.
• 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 Spanish More than 20.000 pages to learn spanish through spanish lessons, tests, exercises, dictionaries and ebooks.

Resources

• Spanish Blogs & Weblog Directory
• Spanish School Search Search for courses and places to learn Spanish in Spain and South America.