Learn to Speak Spanish Audio CD and Books

About the Spanish Language

Spanish (español ) or Castilian (castellano) is a Romance language originally from the northern area of Spain. From there, its use gradually spread inside the Kingdom of Castile, where it evolved and eventually became the principal language of the government and trade. It was later taken to Africa, the Americas and Asia Pacific when they were brought under Spanish colonial rule between the 15th and 19th centuries. 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. Today, it is one of the official languages of Spain, most Latin American countries and Equatorial Guinea. In total, 21 nations use Spanish as their primary language. Spanish is also one of six official languages of the United Nations.

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

Mexico has the world's largest Spanish-speaking population. Spanish is the second most widely spoken language in the United States and by far 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 in general, where on top of the widespread use of English 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 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.

The principle difference between a Spanish Christmas and the Anglo Saxon version is the importance of the 6th January. In Spain this is when presents are given and the three "magic" kings give the presents not father Christmas.Most families have a "belén" (nativity scene) on display in their house. In recent years many families have started to give their children their presents on Chistmas Eve, although this is changing because children have to go to school on the 7th and they don't have time to play with their presents. Families eat together on Cristmas eve and they often eat a stuffed turkey which has the bones removed which requires the skill of a micro-surgeon to prepare. Christmas is less commercial in Spain and the build up does not start until much later.

History of Spanish

The language known today as Spanish is derived from a dialect of spoken Latin in the north-central part of the Iberian Peninsula. Over the period of roughly 1,000 years leading up to the present it expanded from north to south in the Iberian Peninsula, was carried by Spain to its colonial empire, mostly in the Western Hemisphere, and eventually became the official language of some 20 countries and was adopted as one of the six official languages of the United Nations.

The development of Spanish phonology is distinguished from those of other Romance languages by several features:

* thoroughgoing diphthongization of Latin stressed short E and O, in closed syllables as well as open (tiempo, puerta);
* palatalization of Latin -NN- and -LL- (año, silla);
* the phonemic merger of /b/ and /v/ (making the noun tubo and the verb tuvo phonetically equivalent);
* spirantization of /b/, /d/, and /g/ (from Latin P, T, and C), as in sabe, vida, and lago;
* devoicing and further development of the medieval Spanish sibilants, producing the velar fricative in words such as caja, hijo, gente and — in northern and central Spain — the interdental in words such as cinco, hacer, and lazo; and
* aspiration and eventual loss of Latin F, commemorated in modern spelling by the silent h of words such as hablar, hilo, hoja.

Spanish verbal morphology continues the use of some Latin synthetic forms that were replaced by analytic ones in French and Italian (cf. Sp. lavó, Fr. il a lavé), and the Spanish subjunctive mood maintains separate present- and imperfect-tense forms. Spanish syntax provides overt marking for some direct objects (the "personal a"), and Spanish, among the Romance languages, imposes relatively fewer restrictions on the ordering of subject, verb, and object.

Due to its unique history of contact with other languages, the Spanish lexicon contains loanwords from Basque, Arabic, and indigenous languages of the Americas.
The standard Spanish language is also called Castilian. In its earliest documented form, and up through approximately the 15th century, the language is customarily called Old Spanish. From approximately the 16th century on, it is called Modern Spanish. Spanish of the 16th and 17th centuries is sometimes called "classical" Spanish, referring to the literary accomplishments of that period. Unlike English and French, it is not customary to speak of a "middle" stage in the development of Spanish. Castilian Spanish originated, after the decline of the Roman Empire, as a continuation of spoken Latin in the Cantabrian Mountains, in northern Spain, in the 8th and 9th centuries AD, according to most authorities; but others claim it came from Franco-Navarrese and Gothic-Castilian dialects in the 11th century AD. With the Reconquista, this northern dialect spread to the south, where it almost entirely replaced or absorbed the provincial dialects, at the same time as it borrowed massively from the vocabulary of Moorish Arabic and was influenced by Mozarabic (the Romance speech of Christians living in Moorish territory) and medieval Judeo-Spanish (Ladino). These languages all but vanished in the Iberian peninsula by the late 16th century.

The prestige of Old Castile and its language was propagated partly by the exploits of Castilian heroes in the battles of the Reconquista — among them Fernán González and Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar (El Cid) — and by the narrative poems about them that were recited in Castilian even outside the original territory of that dialect. The "first written Spanish" is traditionally considered to have appeared in the Glosas Emilianenses. These are "glosses" (translations of isolated words and phrases in a form more like Spanish than Latin) added between the lines of a manuscript that was written earlier in Latin. Estimates of their date vary from the late 10th to the early 11th century. The first steps toward standardization of written Castilian were taken in the 13th century by King Alfonso X of Castile, known as Alfonso el Sabio (Alfonso the Wise). He assembled scribes at his court and supervised their writing, in Castilian, of extensive works on history, astronomy, law, and other fields of knowledge.

Antonio de Nebrija wrote the first grammar of Spanish and presented it, in 1492, to Queen Isabella, who is said to have had an early appreciation of the usefulness of the language as a tool of hegemony, as if anticipating the empire that was about to be founded with the voyages of Columbus. The Spanish language, like Icelandic, Arabic, and many languages with a classical age, can be read with little help as far back as documents written in the 1100s and before.

The Spanish Royal Academy was founded in 1713, largely with the purpose of preserving the "purity" of the language. The Academy published its first dictionary in six volumes over the period 1726–1739, and its first grammar in 1771, and it continues to produce new editions of both from time to time. Each of the Spanish-speaking countries has an analogous language academy, and an Association of Spanish Language Academies was created in 1951. Beginning in the 16th century, Spanish colonization brought the language to the Americas (Mexico, Central America, and western South America), where it is spoken today, as well as to several island groups in the Pacific where it is no longer spoken by any large numbers of people: the Philippines, Palau, the Marianas (including Guam), and what is today the Federated States of Micronesia). Use of the language in the Americas was continued by descendants of the Spaniards, both by Spanish criollos and by what had then become the mixed Spanish-Amerindian (mestizo) majority. After the wars of independence fought by these colonies in the 19th century, the new ruling elites extended their Spanish to the whole population to strengthen national unity, and the encouragement of all natives to become fluent in Spanish has had a certain amount of success, except in very isolated parts of the former Spanish colonies.

The still-Spanish colonies of Cuba and Puerto Rico encouraged more immigrants from Spain in the late 19th century, and similarly other Latin American countries such as Argentina, nearby Uruguay and to a lesser extent Chile, Colombia, Mexico, Panama and Venezuela, attracted waves of European immigration, Spanish and non-Spanish, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. There, the countries' large (or sizable minority) population groups of second- and third-generation descendants adopted the Spanish language as part of their governments' official assimilation policies to include Europeans who were Catholics and agreed to take an oath of allegiance to their chosen nation's government. When Puerto Rico became a possession of the United States as consequence of the Spanish-American War, its population was by then almost entirely of Spanish and mixed Afro-Caribbean Spanish (mulatto and mestizo) descent, thereby enabling the retention of their inherited Spanish language as a mother tongue while co-existing with the American imposed English as co-official. Puerto Rico has received immigration from Europe, when Spanish colonial officials invited farmers and island fishers from Corsica, the Canary Islands, the Azores, Greece, Malta, Italy and Ireland, while millions of Puerto Ricans went to the mainland U.S. in the 20th century. (see Puerto Rican people and Puerto Ricans in the United States).

A similar situation occurred in the American Southwest including California, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas, where Spaniards, then Californios (Spanish criollos in California) followed by Chicanos (Mexican Americans) and later Mexican immigrants, maintained Spanish alive before, during and after the American appropriation of those territories, since the 1500s. Spanish continues to be used by millions of citizens and immigrants from Latin America to the United States (for example, many Cuban Americans arrived in Miami, Florida beginning in the 1950s and 1960s, and followed by other Latin American groups; the local majority is now Spanish-speaking). Spanish is now treated as the country's "second language," and over 5 percent of the U.S. population are Spanish-speaking, but most Latino/Hispanic Americans are bilingual or also regularly speak English. In the 20th century, Spanish was introduced in Equatorial Guinea and Western Sahara after periods of Spanish colonial rule, and it is also studied and spoken in former French and Portuguese colonies in Africa and Asia, but it is not the main languages of these areas. It is also spoken in parts of the United States that had not been part of the Spanish Empire, such as Spanish Harlem in New York City, at first by immigrants from Puerto Rico, and later by other Latin American immigrants who arrived there in the late 20th century. In the Marianas, the Spanish language was retained until the Pacific War, but is no longer spoken there by any significant number of people.

Language politics in Francoist Spain declared Spanish as the only official language in Spain, and to this day it is the most preferred language in government, business, public education, work place, cultural arts, and the media. But in the 1960s and 1970s, the Spanish parliament agreed to allow provinces to use, speak, and print official documents in three other languages: Catalan for Catalonia, Basque for the Basque provinces, and Galician for Galicia. Since the early 1980s after Spain became a multi-party democracy, these regional and minority languages have rebounded in common usage as secondary languages, but Spanish remains the universal language of the Spanish people. When the United Nations organization was founded in 1945, Spanish was designated one of its five official languages (along with Chinese, English, French, and Russian; a sixth language, Arabic, was added in 1973).

The list of Nobel laureates in Literature includes ten authors who wrote in Spanish (José Echegaray, Jacinto Benavente, Gabriela Mistral, Juan Ramón Jiménez, Miguel Ángel Asturias, Pablo Neruda, Vicente Aleixandre, Gabriel García Márquez, Camilo José Cela, and Octavio Paz).

Many Castilians who took part in the reconquista and later repopulation campaigns were of Basque lineage and this is evidenced by many place names throughout Spain. According to the explanations which negate or downplay Basque influence, the change occurred in the affected dialects wholly independent of each other as the result of internal change (i.e. linguistic factors, not outside influence). It is also possible that the two forces worked in concert and reinforced each other. Although Germanic languages by most accounts affected the phonological development very little, many Spanish words of Germanic origin are very common in all varieties of everyday Spanish. The words for cardinal directions (norte, este, sur, oeste) are all taken from Germanic words (north, east, south and west in Modern English) after the contact with Atlantic sailors, although in old spanish east and west, este y oeste, didn't exist and oriente and occidente, still in use, were used instead. In 711 Spain was invaded by Moors, who brought the Arabic language to the Peninsula. From then until the fall of the Emirate of Granada (1492), Spanish borrowed words from Arabic.

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