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Spanish language
Spanish or Castilian (castellano) is a Latin-derived Romance language that originated in northern Spain, from whence it gradually spread in the Kingdom of Castile, and subsequently evolved into the principal language of government and trade. It was taken to Africa, the Americas and Asia Pacific when the Spanish Empire was established between the 15th and 19th centuries.
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.
Between 322 and 400 million people natively speak Spanish, making it the most spoken Romance language, and possibly the second most-spoken language by native speakers.
Mexico has the world's largest Spanish-speaking population, and Spanish is the second most-widely spoken language in the United States, and the most popular studied foreign language in U.S. schools and universities. Spanish is among the most popular foreign languages for study in the rest of the nations of the Anglosphere besides the global use of English. The many exotic, Spanish-speaking locales attract many people to the language. Smaller numbers also learn it for potential business and employment ventures, although this is largely confined to the United States. Due to proximity, linguistic similarities, and trade reasons it is also a very popular second language in France, 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. Global internet usage statistics for 2007 show Spanish as the third most commonly used language on the internet, after English and Chinese.
According to George Weber's point system, Spanish is the third most influential language in the world (after English and French).
Naming and origin
Spaniards tend to call this language (Spanish) when contrasting it with languages of other states, such as French and English, but call it (Castilian), that is, the language of the Castile region, when contrasting it with other languages spoken in Spain such as Galician (gallego), Basque (euskara), and Catalan (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 to define the official language of the whole Spanish State, as opposed to (lit. the other Spanish languages). Article III reads as follows:
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 ''a generic term with no political or ideological links, much as "Spanish" is in English. Often 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 West Iberian Romance languages: Asturian , Galician , Ladino , and Portuguese , as well as to Aragonese and Catalan .
Catalan, an East Iberian language which exhibits many Gallo-Romance traits, is more similar to the neighbouring Occitan language than to Spanish, or indeed than Spanish and Portuguese are to each other.
Ladino
Ladino, which is essentially medieval Castilian 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. In many ways it is not a separate language but a parallel dialect of Castilian. 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 Castilian. 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 to modern Castilian, during the Spanish occupation of the region.
Vocabulary comparison
Spanish and Italian share a very similar phonological system and do not differ very much in grammar. At present, the lexical similarity with Italian is estimated at 82%. As a result, Spanish and Italian are mutually intelligible to various degrees. The lexical similarity with Portuguese is even 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%): 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 in early modern Portuguese (e.g. The Lusiads)2. in Southern Italian dialects and languages3. in Quebec French
History
Spanish evolved from Vulgar Latin, with minor influences from Arabic during the Andalusian period and from Basque and Celtiberian, and some 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 , palatalization and diphthongation (stem-changing) of short eand ofrom Vulgar Latin . Similar phenomena can be found in other Romance languages as well.
During the , this northern dialect from Cantabria was carried south, and remains a minority language in the northern coastal Morocco.
The first Latin-to-Spanish grammar was written in Salamanca, Spain, in 1492, by Elio Antonio de Nebrija. When it was presented to Isabel de Castilla, 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 taken to the Americas and the Spanish East Indies via Spanish colonization, and in that epoch, Spanish became the principal language of politics and Art in most of Europe; French replaced it in the 18th century.
In the 20th century, Spanish was introduced to Equatorial Guinea and the Western Sahara, the United States, such as in Spanish Harlem, in New York City, that had not been part of the Spanish Empire. For details on borrowed words and other external influences upon Spanish, see Influences on the Spanish language.
Characterization
A defining characteristic of Spanish was the diphthongization of the Latin short vowels eand ointo ieand ue, respectively, when they were stressed. Similar sound changes are found in other Romance languages, but in Spanish they were significant. Some examples:
Lat. > Sp. , It. , Fr. , Port./Gal. "stone".
Lat. > Sp. , It. , Fr. / , Rom. , Port./Gal. "die".
Peculiar to early Spanish was the mutation of Latin initial f-into h-'' whenever it was followed by a vowel that did not diphthongate. Compare for instance:
Lat. > It. , Port. , Gal. , Fr. , Occitan (but Gascon ) Sp. (but Ladino );
late Lat. > Lad. , Port./Gal. , Sp. ;
but Lat. > It. , Port./Gal. , Sp./Lad. .
Some consonant clusters of Latin also produced characteristically different results in these languages, for example:
Lat. , acc. , > Lad. , , ; Sp. , , . However, in Spanish there are also the forms , , ; Port. , , ; Gal. , , .
Lat. acc. , , > Lad. , , ; Sp. , , ; Port. , , ; Gal. , , .
Geographic distribution
Spanish is one of the official languages of the European Union, the Organization of American States, the Organization of Ibero-American States, the United Nations, and the Union of South American Nations.
Europe
Spanish is official in Spain, the country for which it is named and from which it originated. It is also spoken in Gibraltar, though English is the official language. Likewise, it is spoken in Andorra though Catalan is the official language. It is also spoken by small communities in other European countries, such as the United Kingdom, France, and Germany. Spanish is an official language of the European Union. In Switzerland, Spanish is the mother tongue of 1.7% of the population, representing the first minority after the 4 official languages of the country.
The Americas
Latin America
Most Spanish speakers are in Latin America; of most countries with the most Spanish speakers, only Spain is outside of America. Mexico has most of the world's native speakers. Nationally, Spanish is the official language of Argentina, Bolivia (co-official Quechua and Aymara), Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay (co-official Guarani), Peru , Uruguay, and Venezuela. Spanish is also the official language (co-official language English) in the U.S. commonwealth of Puerto Rico.
The non-Spanish speaking America
Spanish has no official recognition in the former British colony of Belize, however, per the 2000 census, 52.1 per cent of the population speaks the language "very well." Mainly, it is spoken by Hispanic descendants who remained in the region since the 17th century, however, English is the official language.
Spain colonised Trinidad and Tobago first, in 1498, leaving the Carib people the Spanish language. Also the Cocoa panyols, laborers from Venezuela took their culture and language with them, they are accredited with the music of "Parang" ("Parranda") on the island. Because of Trinidad's location on the South American coast, the country is much influenced by its Spanish-speaking neighbors. A recent census shows that more than 1,500 inhabitants spoke Spanish. In 2004, the government launched the Spanish as a First Foreign Language (SAFFL) initiative in March 2005. Government regulations require Spanish to be taught, beginning in primary school, while thirty percent of public employees are to be linguistically competent within five years. The government also announced that Spanish will be the country's second, official language by 2020, beside English.
Spanish is important in Brazil because of its proximity to and increased trade with its Spanish-speaking neighbours, for example, as a member of the Mercosur trading bloc. In 2005, the National Congress of Brazil approved a bill, signed to law by the President, making Spanish available as a foreign language in secondary schools. In many border towns and villages (especially on the Uruguayan-Brazilian border) a mixed language, known as Portunol, is spoken.
In Haiti, French is one of two official languages, but is spoken by only about 10 per cent of the population. All Haitians speak Creole, the country's other official language. The latter, is a creole based on the French and African languages, with some English, Taino, Portuguese, and Spanish influences. Spanish, though unofficial, is spoken by a growing portion of the population. It is spoken near the border with the Dominican Republic, however, Spanish is being spoken in westward areas, as Venezuelan, Cuban, and Dominican trade influence Haitian society, and Haiti becomes involved in Latin American affairs.
United States
Per the 2006 census, 44.3 million people of the U.S. population were of Hispanic heritage; 34 million people, 12.2 per cent, of the population older than 5 years speak Spanish at home. In the U.S., Spanish has a long history in the United States (many southern states were part of Mexico and Spain) and it recently has been revitalised by much immigration from Latin America. Spanish is the most widely taught foreign language in the country. Although the U.S. has no formally designated "official languages", Spanish is formally recognized at the state level, beside English; in the U.S. state of New Mexico 30 per cent of the population speak it. Spanish is the dominant language in Puerto Rico. In total, the U.S. has the world's fifth-largest Spanish-speaking population.
Asia
Philippines
Although Spanish was an official language in the Philippines, 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 Corazon Aquino administration. However, President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo announced in 2007 during an official visit to Spain that the Spanish language will once more be obligatory in the school curriculumHowever, it should be pointed out that this announcement was either ignored by the media or was omitted from reports, nor does this make Spanish one of the official languages as the official languages of the country are set in the constitution and may only be changed via amendments or revisions, something that has not been done since the constitution was approved in 1987. Spanish is an official auxiliary language, however. 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 Chavacano, a Spanish based creole spoken in Cavite and Zamboanga. Many Philippine languages have numerous Spanish loanwords.
Africa
In Africa, Spanish is official in the UN-recognised but Moroccan-occupied Western Sahara (co-official Arabic) and Equatorial Guinea (co-official French and Portuguese) . Today, nearly 200,000 refugee Sahrawis are able to read and write in Spanish, and several thousands have received university education in foreign countries as part of aid packages (mainly Cuba and Spain). In Equatorial Guinea, Spanish is the predominant language when counting native and non-native speakers , while Fang is the most spoken language by a number of native speakers. It is also spoken in the Spanish cities in continental North Africa (Ceuta and Melilla) and in the autonomous community of Canary Islands . Within Northern Morocco, a former Franco-Spanish protectorate that is also geographically close to Spain, approximately 20,000 people speak Spanish. It is spoken by some communities of Angola, because of the Cuban influence from the Cold War, and Nigeria by Afro-Cuban ex-slaves. In Cote d'Ivoire and Senegal, Spanish can be learned as a second foreign language in the public education system. In 2008, Cervantes Institutes centers will be opened in Lagos and Johannesburg, the first one in the Sub-Saharan Africa
Oceania
Among the countries and territories in Oceania, Spanish is also spoken in Easter Island, 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 , where the older [[:Category: Mexican Australians|Mexican]], [[:Category: Colombian Australians|Colombian]], and [[:Category: Spanish Australians|Spanish]] populations and newer [[:Category: Argentine-Australians|Argentine]] and [[:Category: Uruguayan Australians|Uruguyan]] communities live.
The island nations of Guam, Palau, Northern Marianas, Marshall Islands and Federated States of Micronesia all once had Spanish speakers, since Marianas and Caroline Islands were Spanish colonial possessions until late 19th century (see Spanish-American War), but Spanish has since been forgotten. It now only exists as an influence on the local native languages and also spoken by Hispanic American resident populations.
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.
Voseo
Spanish has three second-person singular pronouns: , , and in some parts of Latin America, (the use of this pronoun and/or its verb forms is called voseo). Generally speaking, and are informal and used with friends . is universally regarded as the formal address , and is used as a mark of respect, as when addressing one's elders or strangers.
is used extensively as the primary spoken form of the second-person singular pronoun in many countries of Latin America, including Argentina, Costa Rica, the central mountain region of Ecuador, the State of Chiapas in Mexico, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Paraguay, Uruguay, the Paisa region of Colombia and the State of Zulia in Venezuela. In Argentina, Uruguay, Nicaragua, and increasingly in Paraguay and most Central American countries, it is also the standard form used in the media, but the media in other countries with generally continue to use or except in advertisements, for instance. 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 Voseo.
Ustedes
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, . In Spain there are two forms — (formal) and (familiar). The pronoun is the plural form of in most of Spain, but in the Americas it is replaced with . It is remarkable that the use of for the informal plural "you" in southern Spain does not follow the usual rule for pronoun-verb agreement; e.g., while the formal form for "you go", , uses the third-person plural form of the verb, in Cadiz or Seville the informal form is constructed as , 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 correspond to manteca, palta, and damasco, respectively, in Argentina, Chile and Uruguay. The everyday Spanish words coger , 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 Nicaragua simply means "stingy". Other examples include taco, which means "swearword" in Spain but is known to the rest of the world as a Mexican dish. Pija in many countries of Latin America is an obscene slang word for "penis", while in Spain 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 Association of Spanish Language Academies), 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 (Standard Spanish) is widely acknowledged for use in literature, academic contexts and the media.
Writing system
Spanish is written using the Latin alphabet, with the addition of the character n and the digraphs ch and ll . However, the digraph rr , which also represents a distinct phoneme , is not similarly regarded as a single letter. Thus, the traditional Spanish alphabet has 28 letters :
a, b, c, d, e, f, g, h, i, j, k, l, m, n, n, o, p, q, r, s, t, u, v, w, x, y, z.
The digraphs "ch" and "ll" have been disabled by the Real Academia Espanola.
Since 1994, the digraphs ch and ll are to be treated as letter pairs, though for collation 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."No obstante, en el X Congreso de la Asociacion de Academias de la Lengua Espanola, celebrado en 1994, se acordo adoptar para los diccionarios academicos, a peticion de varios organismos internacionales, el orden alfabetico latino universal, en el que la ch y la ll no se consideran letras independientes. En consecuencia, estas dos letras pasan a alfabetizarse en los lugares que les corresponden dentro de la C (entre -cg- y -ci-) y dentro de la L (entre -lk- y -lm-), respectivamente." Real Academia Espanola. Explanation at http://www.spanishpronto.com/ (in Spanish and English) 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 Mexico , pronunciation can be entirely determined from spelling. A typical Spanish word is stressed on the syllable 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 acute accent on the stressed vowel.
The acute accent is used, in addition, to distinguish between certain homophones, especially when one of them is a stressed word and the other one is a clitic: compare with ("he" or "it"), or , (preposition "of" or "from"), and (reflexive pronoun) with ("tea"), ("give") and .
The interrogative pronouns also receive accents in direct or indirect questions, and some demonstratives can be accented when used as pronouns. The conjunction ("or") is written with an accent between numerals so as not to be confused with a zero: e.g., should be read as rather than . 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 RAE 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 diaeresis (u) to indicate that it is not silent as it normally would be (e.g., ciguena, "stork", is pronounced ; if it were written ciguena, it would be pronounced .
Interrogative and exclamatory clauses are introduced with inverted question ( ) and exclamation marks ( ).
Sounds
The phonemic inventory listed in the following table includes phonemes that are preserved only in some dialects, other dialects having merged them (such as yeismo); these are marked with an asterisk (*). Sounds in parentheses are allophones.
By the 16th century, the consonant system of Spanish underwent the following important changes that differentiated it from neighboring Romance languages such as Portuguese and Catalan:
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 bilabial approximant (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 Catalan) and Latin America (notably Peru).
The voiced alveolar fricative 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 voiced postalveolar fricative 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 voiced alveolar affricate merged with its voiceless counterpart , which then developed into the interdental , now written z, or c before e, i. But in Andalusia, the Canary Islands and the Americas this sound merged with as well. See Ceceo, for further information.
The consonant system of Medieval Spanish has been better preserved in Ladino and in Portuguese, neither of which underwent these shifts.
Lexical stress
Spanish is a syllable-timed language, so each syllable has the same duration regardless of stress. Stress most often occurs on any of the last three syllables of a word, with some rare exceptions at the fourth last. The tendencies of stress assignment are as follows:
In words ending in vowels and , stress most often falls on the penultimate syllable.
In words ending in all other consonants, the stress more often falls on the ultimate syllable.
Preantepenultimate stress occurs rarely and only in words like guardandoselos ('saving them for him/her') where a clitic follows certain verbal forms.
In addition to the many exceptions to these tendencies, there are numerous minimal pairs which contrast solely on stress. For example, sabana, with penultimate stress, means 'savannah' while '''', with antepenultimate stress, means 'sheet'; '''' ('boundary'), '''' ('[that] he/she limits') and '''' ('I limited') also contrast solely on stress.
Phonological stress may be marked orthographically with an acute accent . This is done according to the mandatory stress rules of Spanish orthography which are similar to the tendencies above (differing with words like distincion) and are defined so as to unequivocally indicate where the stress lies in a given written word. An acute accent may also be used to differentiate homophones (such as '''' for 'tea' and
An amusing example of the significance of intonation in Spanish is the phrase ("What do you mean / 'how / do I eat'? / I eat / the way / I eat!").
Grammar
Spanish is a relatively inflected language, with a two-gender system and about fifty conjugated forms per verb, but limited inflection of nouns, adjectives, and determiners.
It is right-branching, uses prepositions, and usually, though not always, places adjectives after nouns. Its syntax is generally Subject Verb Object, though variations are common. It is a pro-drop language (allows the deletion of pronouns when pragmatically unnecessary) and verb-framed.
See also
List of languages by number of native speakers
Chavacano language
Differences between Spanish and Portuguese
Frespanol
Hispanic culture
Hispanophone
Instituto Cervantes
Islenos
Latin Union
List of English words of Spanish origin
Llanito
Names given to the Spanish language
Palenquero
Papiamento
Portuguese language
Portunol
Real Academia Espanola
Rock en espanol
Romance languages
Spanglish
Spanish-based creole languages
Spanish language learning and teaching
Spanish language poets
Spanish profanity
Spanish proverbs
Spanish Empire
Local varieties
Andalusian Spanish
Argentine Spanish
Bolivian Spanish
Caliche
Canarian Spanish
Castrapo (Spanish spoken in Galicia as opposed to Galician)
Central American Spanish
Colombian Spanish
Chilean Spanish
Cuban Spanish
Dominican Spanish
Mexican Spanish
New Mexican Spanish
Panamanian Spanish
Peruvian Coast Spanish
Puerto Rican Spanish
Rioplatense Spanish
Spanish in the Philippines
Spanish in the United States
Venezuelan Spanish
External links
Dictionary of the RAE Real Academia Espanola's official Spanish language dictionary
on WikiTravel
The Project Gutenberg EBook of A First Spanish Reader by Erwin W. Roessler and Alfred Remy.
Spanish Conversations at Different Levels for Listening Practice
Spanish - BBC Languages
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This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article Spanish language
