- This article is about the international language known as Spanish. For other languages spoken in Spain see Languages of
Spain.
Spanish or Castilian 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; secondary populations inhabit the
United States and Spain itself.
Almost no Spanish is spoken in Africa, save for Equatorial Guinea and Western Sahara, or
Asia, where it is only spoken in some areas of the Philippines.
"Spanish" or "Castilian"
Spaniards tend to call their language español (Spanish) when contrasting it with other national languages (for example:
in a list with French and English), but call it castellano (Castilian, from the Castile region) when contrasting it with regional 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.
Classification
Spanish is a member of the Romance branch of Indo-European, descended largely from Latin and having much in common with its geographical neighbors.
History
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 (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.
During the Reconquista, this northern dialect was carried south,
and indeed is still a minority language in northern Morocco.
The language was brought to the Americas, Federated States of Micronesia, Guam, Marianas, Palau and the Philippines, by Spanish colonization, beginning in
the 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 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. 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, Aymara and many other ones), Puerto Rico, Spain (co-official Catalan/Valencian, Galician, and Basque), Uruguay and Venezuela .
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 Creole is also spoken.
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 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.
Spanish is also spoken in Aruba (both standard Spanish and Papiamento), Canada, Israel (both standard Spanish and Ladino Judaeo-Spanish), northern
Morocco, Netherlands Antilles (both standard Spanish and Papiamento), Trinidad and Tobago, Turkey (Ladino Judaeo-Spanish),
the U.S. Virgin Islands, and Western Sahara.
In Brazil, where virtually the whole population speaks Portuguese, Spanish is obtaining an important status as a second or
third language (after English) among young students and some skilled professionals. The many similarities between the two
languages - along with the fact that Spanish is the dominant and official language of almost every country that borders Brazil -
improve that popularity.
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 in counting systems used in all matters and circumstances, the Spanish
decimals are still widely utilized when counting currency, telling time, one's age
etc. The calendar system is a Filipino version of the Spanish calendar. 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, with some speakers in Sabah,
Malaysia. Most other native Philippine languages contain generous quantities of
Spanish loan words.
In addition to the Philippines, it may also be spoken in other Asian countries with no
official status. Such instances include Mexican-born Chinese
deported to China, and third or fourth generation ethnic Japanese
Peruvians returning to their ancestral homeland of Japan, now much more prosperous than when their forebears emigrated.
Variations
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.
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.
Vos is used extensively as the primary form of the second-person singular in various countries around Latin America
(Argentina, Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Paraguay and Uruguay) but can 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 also differ considerably between regions.
Spanish dialects 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
(also: Spanish verbs)
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.
As for syntax, the unmarked sentence word order is Subject
Verb Object, though variations are possible. Spanish is right-branching, with prepositions - with
adjectives generally coming after nouns.
Spanish is also pro-drop (allows the elision of pronouns when
unnecessary) and verb-framed.
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,
specially 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), 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, 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 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!). This feature provides an immediate
understanding of a written sentence's sense from its very beginning. 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. 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. When
it comes before the noun, it is usually because of an expressive intention.
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
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.
| English |
Spanish |
IPA transcription |
Figured pronunciation |
| Spanish |
español |
[espa'ɲol] |
(es-pahn-YOL) |
| Spanish (Castilian) |
castellano |
[kaste'ʎano] |
(kah-steh-YAH-no) |
| hello, hi |
hola |
['ola] |
(OH-la) |
| goodbye |
adiós |
[a'ðjos] |
(ah-THYOSE) |
| please |
por favor |
[porfa'βor] |
(pore faah-VORE) |
| thank you |
gracias |
['graθjas] |
(GRAH-thyahs) |
| sorry |
perdón |
[per'ðon] |
(pare-THON) |
| because |
porque |
['porke] |
(PORE-keh) |
| hurry up! |
¡date prisa! |
['date'prisa] |
(DAH-teh PREE-sah) |
| that (thing) |
eso |
['eso] |
(EH-saw) |
| how much? |
cuánto |
['kwanto] |
(KWAHN-to) |
| for example |
por ejemplo |
[por e'xemplo] |
(pore eh-HEM-ploh) |
| English |
inglés |
[iŋ'gles] |
(ing-GLESS) |
| yes |
sí |
['si] |
(SEE) |
| no |
no |
['no] |
(noh) |
| I don't understand |
no entiendo |
[noen'tjendo] |
(noh en-tYEN-do) |
| where's the bathroom? |
¿dónde está el baño? |
['dondees'tael'βaɲo] |
(DON-deh es-TAH el BA-nyo) |
| cheers! (toast) |
¡salud! |
[sa'luð] |
(sah-LOOTHE) |
| do you speak English? |
¿habla usted inglés? |
['aβlaws'teðiɲ'gles] |
(AH-blah oos-TED ing-GLESS) |
| English: |
In some village in La Mancha, whose name I do not care to recall, there dwelt not so long ago a gentleman of the type wont to
keep an unused lance, an old shield, a greyhound for racing, and a skinny old horse. |
| Spanish: |
En un lugar de la Mancha, de cuyo nombre no quiero acordarme, no ha mucho tiempo que vivía un hidalgo de los de lanza en
astillero, adarga antigua, rocín flaco y galgo corredor. |
| IPA transcription: |
[enunlu'ɣarðela'mantʃa de'kuɟo'nombreno'kjeroakor'ðarme noa'mutʃo'tjempokeβi'βiauni'ðalɣo
ðelozðe'lanθaenasti'ʎero a'ðarɣaan'tiɣwa rro'θin'flako i'ɣalɣokorre'ðor] |
El
Ingenioso Hidalgo Don Quixote de la Mancha, Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra (opening sentence).
External links
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