Spanish language

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

Spanish is an Iberian Romance language, and the third or fourth most 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). The majority of Spanish speakers live in Latin America.

“Spanish” or “Castilian”

Main article: Names given to the Spanish language

Spaniards tend to call their language español (Spanish) when contrasting it with other national languages (e.g. in a list with French and English), but call it castellano (Castilian) when contrasting it with regional languages of Spain (like 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.

Classification

Spanish is a member of the Romance branch of Indo-European.

History

Main article: History of the Spanish language

The Spanish language was developed from vulgar Latin, with influence from 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 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.

During the Reconquista, this northern dialect was carried south.

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

In the 20th century, Spanish was introduced in Equatorial Guinea and Western Sahara.

Geographic distribution

Spanish is one of the official languages of the United Nations, the European Union and the African Union.

With close to 100 million first-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. 41 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 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 Aymará), Puerto Rico, Spain (co-official Catalan, Galician, Basque and Aranese), Uruguay and Venezuela .

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

It is spoken by most of the population of Gibraltar (which is claimed by Spain), but English remains the most spoken and only official language of the colony.

In the United States — which has no officially recognized national language — Spanish is spoken by some three-quarters of its over 40 million Hispanic population. It is also being learnt and spoken by a small, though slowly growing, proportion of its non-Hispanic population for its increasing use in business, commerce and politics. On a federal level it shares a privileged position along with the more dominant English. On a state level, however, Spanish does hold co-official status in various states. [See Spanish in the United States for further information.]

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

In the Philippines, where its use has been in decline, Spanish ceased to be an official language in 1973. It is now spoken by less than 0.01% of the population; 2,658 speakers (1990 Census). Interestingly, despite the native and English numerals being the only counting systems used in all matters and circumstances, the Spanish decimals are still utilized by many when counting currency. Furthermore, the sole existing Spanish-Asiatic creole language, Chabacano, is spoken by 292,630 (1990 census) Filipinos. The speakers are mainly confined to various regions on island of Mindanao and a region south of Manila on the island of Luzon. Most other native Philippine languages contain generous quantities of Spanish loan words.

Variations

Main article: Spanish dialects and varieties

There are important variations in dialect 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. Tú and vos are informal (for example, used with friends) and usted is formal (for example, used with older people).

Vos is used in various regions of Latin America (Costa Rica, Argentina, Uruguay , Paraguay and western Venezuela), and its use, depending on region, can be considered the accepted standard or reproached as sub-standard and considered as speech of the uneducated. The interpersonal situations in which the employment of vos is acceptable also differ between regions.

Spanish dialects also differ regarding second-person plural pronouns: most dialects use ustedes in every case, while Castilian prefers vosotros and reserves ustedes for formal use.

The RAE (Real Academia Española), in association with twenty-one other national language academies, exercises a conservative 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 no noun declension and limited pronominal declension.

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 neighbouring 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.
• The voiced alveolar fricative /z/ (that was written 's' between vowels) merged with the voiceless /s/ (that was written 's', or 'ss' between vowels), and these are now written 's' everywhere.
• 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.
• 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 Judaeo-Spanish, the language spoken by the descendants of the Jews 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 "I walk" or "road" 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 doesn't follow the normal pattern or to differentiate otherwise equally spelt words (see below); diaeresis u (ü) after g to indicate a [gw] or [gu] pronunciation; and n with tilde (ñ) to indicate the palatal nasal [J]. 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 (http://buscon.rae.es/draeI/SrvltGUIBusUsual?TIPO_HTML=2&LEMA=ch) and ll (http://buscon.rae.es/draeI/SrvltGUIBusUsual?TIPO_HTML=2&LEMA=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! (That's not true!). It 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 don't follow the default stress have an acute accent over the stressed vowel.

A word with final stress is called aguda; a word with penultimate stress is called llana or grave; a word with antepenultimate stress (stress on the third last syllable) is called esdrújula; and a word with preantepenultimate stress (on the fourth last syllable) or earlier is called sobresdrújula in which case there is a secondary stress towards the end of the word. All esdrújula and sobresdrújula words 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 (object case of "you") and té ("tea"); se (third person reflexive) and sé ("I know" or imperative "Be"); como ("like" or "I eat") and cómo ("how?").

An adjective describing a person or thing ordinarily comes after the noun in Spanish, not before the noun as in English.

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, vacilations 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 succeded 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 the Quixote).

Examples of Spanish

Note, the third column uses the International Phonetic Alphabet, the standard for linguists, to transcribe the sounds. If you are not familiar with the IPA, or your browser is too old to display special characters correctly, there is an approximate pronunciation based on English in the fourth column. There are several examples of travellers' vocabulary and one literary reference.

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

See also

• Real Academia Española
• Spanish in the United States
• Spanish in the Philippines
• Spanish proverbs
• Spanish language poets
• Spanish Creole
• Common phrases in different languages
• Papiamento, Chavacano language, Spanglish, Yanito
• Rock en español
• Spanish verbs
• Latin Union

External links

Wikibooks has a textbook about Spanish language.

• Official page of the RAE (http://www.rae.es) (in Spanish)
• DRAE, Dictionary of the RAE (http://buscon.rae.es/diccionario/drae.htm) (in Spanish)
• Ethnologue report for Spanish (http://www.ethnologue.com/show_language.asp?code=SPN)
• Spanish Blogs & Weblog Directory (http://www.spanishblogger.com)
• Spanish Language & Linguistics Website (http://www.staff.ncl.ac.uk/i.e.mackenzie/index.html)
• Spanish grammar Wikibook (http://textbook.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish)
• Spanish dictionary (http://www.online-dictionary.biz/english/spanish)
• Usage of Tenses (http://www.econ.jhu.edu/people/tchaidze/SPANGRAM/tenses.html#correspondence)
• PDF: A history of the Spanish language (http://assets.cambridge.org/0521805872/sample/0521805872WS.pdf)
• Basic Spanish Words + Translator (http://members.aol.com/alvareze/spanish/frame.html)
• Spanish – English Dictionary (http://www.websters-online-dictionary.org/definition/Spanish-english/): from Webster's Rosetta Edition.
• Diccionario.com (http://www.diccionario.com)
• Spanish for speakers of Latin (http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Aegean/2444/splatin.html)
• Some Useful Spanish Phrases with Audio. (http://www.quiz-buddy.com/Spanish_Phrases_with_Audio.html)

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