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120-623: The language known today as Spanish is derived from spoken Latin , which was brought to the Iberian Peninsula by the Romans after their occupation of the peninsula that started in the late 3rd century BC. Today it is the world's 4th most widely spoken language, after English, Mandarin Chinese and Hindi. Influenced by the peninsular hegemony of Al-Andalus in the early middle ages, Hispano-Romance varieties borrowed substantial lexicon from Arabic . Upon
240-404: A "redundant" pronoun ( le , les ) appears even in the presence of an explicit noun phrase . (Neither feature occurs in other Western Romance languages , but both are features of Romanian , with pe < PER corresponding to Spanish a .) With regard to subject pronouns, Spanish is a pro-drop language , meaning that the verb phrase can often stand alone without the use of a subject pronoun (or
360-583: A Spanish-based creole language called Chavacano developed in the southern Philippines. However, it is not mutually intelligible with Spanish. The number of Chavacano-speakers was estimated at 1.2 million in 1996. The local languages of the Philippines also retain significant Spanish influence, with many words derived from Mexican Spanish , owing to the administration of the islands by Spain through New Spain until 1821, until direct governance from Madrid afterwards to 1898. Past tense The past tense
480-588: A considerable number of words from Arabic , as well as a minor influence from the Germanic Gothic language through the period of Visigoth rule in Iberia. In addition, many more words were borrowed from Latin through the influence of written language and the liturgical language of the Church. The loanwords were taken from both Classical Latin and Renaissance Latin , the form of Latin in use at that time. According to
600-590: A different meaning in Spanish. Later, after the time of intervocalic voicing, unstressed vowels were lost between other combinations of consonants: Words capital, computar, hospital, recitar and vindicar are learned words; cf. capitālem, computāre, hospitālem, recitāre, and vindicāre and alternate forms caudal, contar, hostal, rezar, and vengar . While voiceless intervocalic consonants regularly became voiced, many voiced intervocalic stops ( d , g , and occasionally b ) were dropped from words altogether through
720-467: A dramatic change in the pronunciation of its sibilant consonants , known in Spanish as the reajuste de las sibilantes , which resulted in the distinctive velar [x] pronunciation of the letter ⟨j⟩ and—in a large part of Spain—the characteristic interdental [θ] ("th-sound") for the letter ⟨z⟩ (and for ⟨c⟩ before ⟨e⟩ or ⟨i⟩ ). See History of Spanish (Modern development of
840-457: A few; making up 8% of the Spanish dictionary—the second largest lexical influence on Spanish after Latin. It is thought that the bilingualism of the Mozarabs facilitated the large transfer of vocabulary from Arabic to Castilian. The neighboring Romance languages—such as Andalusi Romance , Galician/Portuguese , Catalan , French , and Occitan —contributed greatly to the Spanish lexicon throughout
960-476: A first language by Spaniards and educated Filipinos ( Ilustrados ). Despite a public education system set up by the colonial government, by the end of Spanish rule in 1898, only about 10% of the population had knowledge of Spanish, mostly those of Spanish descent or elite standing. Spanish continued to be official and used in Philippine literature and press during the early years of American administration after
1080-488: A less remote proximal tense which is used for very recent past events and is never interchangeable with the ordinary past form. These languages also differ substantially from European languages in coding tense with prefixes instead of such suffixes as English -ed . Other, smaller language families of Africa follow quite regional patterns. Thus the Sudanic languages of East Africa and adjacent Afro-Asiatic families are part of
1200-557: 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. In some countries, they had to be Catholics and agreed to take an oath of allegiance to their chosen nation's government. When Puerto Rico became
1320-471: A long history in the territory of the current-day United States dating back to the 16th century. In the wake of the 1848 Guadalupe Hidalgo Treaty , hundreds of thousands of Spanish speakers became a minoritized community in the United States. The 20th century saw further massive growth of Spanish speakers in areas where they had been hitherto scarce. According to the 2020 census, over 60 million people of
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#17330857132061440-505: A past tense. In English, the past tense (or preterite ) is one of the inflected forms of a verb. The past tense of regular verbs is made by adding -d or -ed to the base form of the verb, while those of irregular verbs are formed in various ways (such as see→saw , go→went , be→was/were ). With regular and some irregular verbs, the past tense form also serves as a past participle . For full details of past tense formation, see English verbs . Past events are often referred to using
1560-561: A possession of the United States as a consequence of the Spanish–American War , its population—almost entirely of Spanish and mixed Afro-Caribbean/Spanish ( mulatto and mestizo ) descent—retained its inherited Spanish language as a mother tongue, in co-existence with the American-imposed English as co-official. In the 20th century, more than a million Puerto Ricans migrated to the mainland U.S. (see Puerto Ricans in
1680-498: A primarily Hassaniya Arabic -speaking territory, Spanish was officially spoken as the language of the colonial administration during the late 19th and 20th centuries. Today, Spanish is present in the partially-recognized Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic as its secondary official language, and in the Sahrawi refugee camps in Tindouf ( Algeria ), where the Spanish language is still taught as
1800-795: A process called elision . Latin /b/ between vowels usually changed to /v/ in Old Spanish (e.g. ha b ēre > a v er ), while Latin /p/ became /b/ ( sa p ere > sa b er ). In modern times the two phonemes merged into /b/ ( ha b er , sa b er ), realized as [β] between vowels (see Betacism ). Latin voiced stops— /b/ , /d/ , and /ɡ/ , which are represented orthographically as B, D, and G respectively—and also occurred in intervocalic positions also underwent lenition : [ β ] , [ ð ] , and [ ɣ ] , but appeared in Spanish also through learned words from Classical Latin. Many forms with d and g preserved, e.g. ligar, legal, dígito , crudo , are learned words ( Latinisms ); cf.
1920-409: A reader of Modern Spanish can learn to read medieval documents without much difficulty. The Spanish Royal Academy was founded in 1713, largely with the purpose of standardizing 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. (The Academy's dictionary
2040-417: A reference point that may not coincide with the time an utterance is made. Papuan languages of New Guinea almost always have remoteness distinctions in the past tense (though none are as elaborate as some Native American languages), whilst indigenous Australian languages usually have a single past tense without remoteness distinctions. Creole languages tend to make tense marking optional, and when tense
2160-599: A second language features characteristics involving the variability of the vowel system. While far from its heyday during the Spanish protectorate in Morocco , the Spanish language has some presence in northern Morocco , stemming for example from the availability of certain Spanish-language media. According to a 2012 survey by Morocco's Royal Institute for Strategic Studies (IRES), penetration of Spanish in Morocco reaches 4.6% of
2280-518: A second language, largely by Cuban educators. The number of Spanish speakers is unknown. Spanish is also an official language of the African Union . Spanish was an official language of the Philippines from the beginning of Spanish administration in 1565 to a constitutional change in 1973. During Spanish colonization , it was the language of government, trade, and education, and was spoken as
2400-423: A single past tense. In both West and East Slavic, verbs in the past tense are conjugated for gender (masculine, feminine, neuter) and number (singular, plural). French has numerous forms of the past tense including but not limited to: Spanish and Portuguese have several forms of the past tense, which include but are not limited to: A difference in the pluperfect occurs between Spanish and Portuguese; in
2520-475: A subject noun phrase ). In some cases, such as with impersonal verbs referring to meteorological ( llover , to rain; nevar , to snow) or other natural phenomena ( amanecer , to get light out; anochecer , to get dark out), it is ungrammatical to include a subject. Compared to other Romance languages, Spanish has a somewhat freer syntax with relatively fewer restrictions on subject-verb-object word order . Due to prolonged language contact with other languages,
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#17330857132062640-758: Is izquierda "left". Basque is perhaps most evident in some common Spanish surnames, including García and Echeverría . Basque place names also are prominent throughout Spain, because many Castilians who took part in the Reconquista and repopulation of Moorish Iberia by Christians were of Basque lineage. Iberian and Celtiberian likewise are thought to have contributed place names to Spain. Words of everyday use that are attributed to Celtic sources include camino "road", carro "cart", colmena "hive", and cerveza "beer". Suffixes such as - iego : mujeriego "womanizer" and - ego : gallego "Galician" are also attributed to Celtic sources. Influence of Basque phonology
2760-416: Is cognate to the root word of satisfacer ("to satisfy"), and hecho ("made") is similarly cognate to the root word of satisfecho ("satisfied"). Compare the examples in the following table: Some consonant clusters of Latin also produced characteristically different results in these languages, as shown in the examples in the following table: In the 15th and 16th centuries, Spanish underwent
2880-534: Is a grammatical tense whose function is to place an action or situation in the past. Examples of verbs in the past tense include the English verbs sang , went and washed . Most languages have a past tense, with some having several types in order to indicate how far back the action took place. Some languages have a compound past tense which uses auxiliary verbs as well as an imperfect tense which expresses continuous or repetitive events or actions. Some languages inflect
3000-761: Is a split between complete absence of past marking (especially common in Mesoamerica and the Pacific Northwest) and very complex tense marking with numerous specialised remoteness distinctions, as found for instance in Athabaskan languages and a few languages of the Amazon Basin. Some of these tenses can have specialised mythological significance and uses. A number of Native American languages like Northern Paiute stand in contrast to European notions of tense because they always use relative tense , which means time relative to
3120-563: Is also known as Castilian ( castellano ). The group evolved from several dialects of Vulgar Latin in Iberia after the collapse of the Western Roman Empire in the 5th century. The oldest Latin texts with traces of Spanish come from mid-northern Iberia in the 9th century, and the first systematic written use of the language happened in Toledo , a prominent city of the Kingdom of Castile , in
3240-523: Is credited by some researchers with softening the Spanish labiodentals : turning labiodental [v] to bilabial [β] , and ultimately deleting labiodental [f] . Others negate or downplay Basque phonological influence, claiming that these changes occurred in the affected dialects wholly as a result of factors internal to the language, not outside influence. It is also possible that the two forces, internal and external, worked in concert and reinforced each other. Some words of Greek origin were already present in
3360-399: Is estimated that about 486 million people speak Spanish as a native language , making it the second most spoken language by number of native speakers . An additional 75 million speak Spanish as a second or foreign language , making it the fourth most spoken language in the world overall after English, Mandarin Chinese, and Hindi with a total number of 538 million speakers. Spanish is also
3480-482: Is formed with an auxiliary (haben/sein) and a past participle that is placed at the end of the clause. Dutch mainly uses these two past tenses: Less common is the voltooid verleden tijd , which corresponds to the English past perfect. It is formed by combining an onvoltooid verleden form of zijn ("to be") or hebben ("to have") with the notional verb, for example: Ik was daar voor gisteren al geweest . This means "I had been there before yesterday." This tense
3600-740: Is heavily influenced by Venezuelan Spanish. In addition to sharing most of its borders with Spanish-speaking countries, the creation of Mercosur in the early 1990s induced a favorable situation for the promotion of Spanish language teaching in Brazil . In 2005, the National Congress of Brazil approved a bill, signed into law by the President , making it mandatory for schools to offer Spanish as an alternative foreign language course in both public and private secondary schools in Brazil. In September 2016 this law
3720-466: Is marked invariant pre-verbal markers are used. In Belizean Creole , past tense marking is optional and is rarely used if a semantic temporal marker such as yestudeh "yesterday" is present. Singaporean English Creole ( Singlish ) optionally marks the past tense, most often in irregular verbs (e.g., go → went ) and regular verbs like accept which require an extra syllable for the past tense suffix - ed . Hawaiian Creole English optionally marks
History of the Spanish language - Misplaced Pages Continue
3840-404: Is not only between vowels but also after a vowel and before a sonorant consonant such as /r/ (Latin patrem > Spanish padre )—but not the reverse (Latin partem > Spanish parte , not * parde ). Latin superāre produced both sobrar and its learned doublet superar . Spanish Language Spanish ( español ) or Castilian ( castellano ) is a Romance language of
3960-632: Is now accessible on the Internet.) Today, 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 late fifteenth century, the discovery and colonization of the Americas by Spanish colonizers brought the language across the Atlantic and to Mexico, Central America, and western and southern South America. Under
4080-721: Is related to Castile ( Castilla or archaically Castiella ), the kingdom where the language was originally spoken. The name Castile , in turn, is usually assumed to be derived from castillo ('castle'). In the Middle Ages , the language spoken in Castile was generically referred to as Romance and later also as Lengua vulgar . Later in the period, it gained geographical specification as Romance castellano ( romanz castellano , romanz de Castiella ), lenguaje de Castiella , and ultimately simply as castellano (noun). Different etymologies have been suggested for
4200-806: Is spoken by very small communities in Angola due to Cuban influence from the Cold War and in South Sudan among South Sudanese natives that relocated to Cuba during the Sudanese wars and returned for their country's independence. Spanish is also spoken in the integral territories of Spain in Africa, namely the cities of Ceuta and Melilla and the Canary Islands , located in the Atlantic Ocean some 100 km (62 mi) off
4320-804: Is the de facto national language of the country, Spanish is often used in public services and notices at the federal and state levels. Spanish is also used in administration in the state of New Mexico . The language has a strong influence in major metropolitan areas such as those of Los Angeles , Miami , San Antonio , New York , San Francisco , Dallas , Tucson and Phoenix of the Arizona Sun Corridor , as well as more recently, Chicago , Las Vegas , Boston , Denver , Houston , Indianapolis , Philadelphia , Cleveland , Salt Lake City , Atlanta , Nashville , Orlando , Tampa , Raleigh and Baltimore-Washington, D.C. due to 20th- and 21st-century immigration. Although Spanish has no official recognition in
4440-459: Is the world's second-most spoken native language after Mandarin Chinese ; the world's fourth-most spoken language overall after English , Mandarin Chinese, and Hindustani ( Hindi - Urdu ); and the world's most widely spoken Romance language. The country with the largest population of native speakers is Mexico . Spanish is part of the Ibero-Romance language group , in which the language
4560-603: Is to be encoded. French , for example, has a compound past ( passé composé ) for expressing completed events, and imperfect for continuous or repetitive events. Some languages that grammaticalise for past tense do so by inflecting the verb, while others do so periphrastically using auxiliary verbs , also known as "verbal operators" (and some do both, as in the example of French given above). Not all languages grammaticalise verbs for past tense – Mandarin Chinese , for example, mainly uses lexical means (words like "yesterday" or "last week") to indicate that something took place in
4680-538: Is used to indicate that one action in the past occurred before another past action, and that the action was fully finished before the second action took place. In non-Germanic Indo-European languages , past marking is typically combined with a distinction between perfective and imperfective aspect, with the former reserved for single completed actions in the past. French for instance, has an imperfect tense form similar to that of German but used only for past habitual or past progressive contexts like "I used to..." or "I
4800-868: The Dravidian languages of India; the Uralic languages of Russia; Mongolic ; and Korean . Languages in East Asia and Southeast Asia typically do not distinguish tense; in Mandarin Chinese , for example, the particle 了 le when used immediately after a verb instead indicates perfective aspect . In parts of islands in Southeast Asia, even less distinction is made, for instance in Indonesian and some other Austronesian languages . Past tenses, do, however, exist in most Oceanic languages . Among Native American languages there
4920-701: The Indo-European language family that evolved from the Vulgar Latin spoken on the Iberian Peninsula of Europe . Today, it is a global language with about 500 million native speakers, mainly in the Americas and Spain , and about 600 million when including second language speakers. Spanish is the official language of 20 countries , as well as one of the six official languages of the United Nations . Spanish
History of the Spanish language - Misplaced Pages Continue
5040-607: The Spanish Empire , where adoption of patterns from the southern peninsular norm of Seville (the largest city of the Crown in the 16th century and the port linking to the Americas) was more pervasive, even though in other regards the influence from the latter norm (associated to Andalusian Spanish ) came to be preponderant in the entire Americas. Spanish varieties henceforth borrowed influence from Amerindian languages , primarily coming from
5160-557: The Spanish as a First Foreign Language (SAFFL) initiative in March 2005. Spanish has historically had a significant presence on the Dutch Caribbean islands of Aruba , Bonaire and Curaçao ( ABC Islands ) throughout the centuries and in present times. The majority of the populations of each island (especially Aruba) speaking Spanish at varying although often high degrees of fluency. The local language Papiamentu (Papiamento on Aruba)
5280-446: The Spanish–American War but was eventually replaced by English as the primary language of administration and education by the 1920s. Nevertheless, despite a significant decrease in influence and speakers, Spanish remained an official language of the Philippines upon independence in 1946, alongside English and Filipino , a standardized version of Tagalog . Spanish was briefly removed from official status in 1973 but reimplemented under
5400-631: 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 eleven 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 , Octavio Paz , and Mario Vargas Llosa ). The mention of "influences" on
5520-619: The cardinal directions ( norte, este, sur, oeste ), for example, are all taken from Germanic words (compare north , east , south and west in Modern English ), after the contact with Atlantic sailors. These words did not exist in Spanish prior to the 15th century. Instead, "north" and "south" were septentrion and meridion respectively (both virtually obsolete in Modern Spanish as nouns, unlike their not uncommon adjectival counterparts septentrional and meridional ), while "east"
5640-629: The glossing abbreviation PST . The European continent is heavily dominated by Indo-European languages , all of which have a past tense. In some cases the tense is formed inflectionally as in English see/saw or walks/walked and as in the French imperfect form, and sometimes it is formed periphrastically , as in the French passé composé form. Further, all of the non-Indo-European languages in Europe, such as Basque , Hungarian , and Finnish , also have
5760-684: The present perfect construction, as in I have finished (also known as present in past ). However this is not regarded as an instance of the past tense; instead it is viewed as a combination of present tense with perfect aspect , specifying a present state that results from past action. (It can be made into a past tense form by replacing the auxiliary have with had ; see below.) Various multi-word constructions exist for combining past tense with progressive (continuous) aspect, which denotes ongoing action; with perfect aspect; and with progressive and perfect aspects together. These and other common past tense constructions are listed below. For details of
5880-453: The preterite is mostly used solely in writing, for example in stories. Use in speech is regarded as snobbish and thus very uncommon. South German dialects, such as the Bavarian dialect, as well as Yiddish and Swiss German, have no preterite (with the exception of sein and wollen ), but only perfect constructs. In certain regions, a few specific verbs are used in the preterite, for instance
6000-424: The 13th century. Spanish colonialism in the early modern period spurred the introduction of the language to overseas locations, most notably to the Americas. As a Romance language, Spanish is a descendant of Latin. Around 75% of modern Spanish vocabulary is Latin in origin, including Latin borrowings from Ancient Greek. Alongside English and French , it is also one of the most taught foreign languages throughout
6120-627: The 1560s onward the standard written form followed Madrid 's. The Spanish language expanded overseas in the Early Modern period in the wake of the Spanish conquests in the Americas (as well as the Canary Islands ). Besides the Caribbean, the colonial administration in the new territories had its main centres of power located in Mexico City and Lima , which retained more features from the central peninsular norm than other more peripheral territories of
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#17330857132066240-525: 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 several areas of northern and central Spain. Eventually,
6360-404: The 2021–2022 school year alone. The local business process outsourcing industry has also helped boost the language's economic prospects. Today, while the actual number of proficient Spanish speakers is around 400,000, or under 0.5% of the population, a new generation of Spanish speakers in the Philippines has likewise emerged, though speaker estimates vary widely. Aside from standard Spanish,
6480-574: The 20th century, Spanish was introduced to Equatorial Guinea and the Western Sahara , and to areas of the United States that had not been part of the Spanish Empire, such as Spanish Harlem in New York City . For details on borrowed words and other external influences upon Spanish, see Influences on the Spanish language . Spanish is the primary language in 20 countries worldwide. As of 2023, it
6600-707: The 20th century, with words borrowed from many fields of activity, including sports, technology, and commerce. The incorporation into Spanish of learned, or "bookish" words from its own ancestor language, Latin , is arguably another form of lexical borrowing through the influence of written language and the liturgical language of the Church. Throughout the Middle Ages and into the early modern period, most literate Spanish-speakers were also literate in Latin; and thus they easily adopted Latin words into their writing—and eventually speech—in Spanish. The form of Latin that Spaniards spoke and
6720-556: The Caribbean, the Central-Andean and Mesoamerican regions. Today it is the official language of 20 countries , as well as an official language of numerous international organizations , including the United Nations . The development of Spanish phonology is distinguished from those of other nearby Romance languages (e.g. Portuguese , Catalan ) by several features: The following features are characteristic of Spanish phonology and also of some other Ibero-Romance languages , but not
6840-639: The Equatoguinean education system and is the primary language used in government and business. Whereas it is not the mother tongue of virtually any of its speakers, the vast majority of the population is proficient in Spanish. The Instituto Cervantes estimates that 87.7% of the population is fluent in Spanish. The proportion of proficient Spanish speakers in Equatorial Guinea exceeds the proportion of proficient speakers in other West and Central African nations of their respective colonial languages. Spanish
6960-454: The Iberian Peninsula by the late 16th century. The prestige of 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"
7080-577: The Iberian Peninsula. These languages included Proto-Basque , Iberian , Lusitanian , Celtiberian and Gallaecian . The first documents to show traces of what is today regarded as the precursor of modern Spanish are from the 9th century. Throughout the Middle Ages and into the modern era , the most important influences on the Spanish lexicon came from neighboring Romance languages — Mozarabic ( Andalusi Romance ), Navarro-Aragonese , Leonese , Catalan/Valencian , Portuguese , Galician , Occitan , and later, French and Italian . Spanish also borrowed
7200-712: The Marianas, the Spanish language was retained until the Pacific War , but is no longer spoken there by any significant number of people. As part of Chile since 1888, Spanish is spoken by most people in Easter Island along with Rapa Nui language . Language politics in Francoist Spain declared Spanish as the only official language in Spain, and to this day it is the most widely used language in government, business, public education,
7320-582: The Middle Ages and into the modern era. Borrowing from Italian occurred most frequently in the 16th and 17th centuries, due largely to the influence of the Italian Renaissance . The creation of the Spanish Empire in the New World led to lexical borrowing from indigenous languages of the Americas , especially vocabulary dealing with flora, fauna, and cultural concepts unique to the Americas. Borrowing from English has become especially strong, beginning in
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#17330857132067440-475: The Old Spanish sibilants) for details. The Gramática de la lengua castellana , written in Salamanca in 1492 by Elio Antonio de Nebrija , was the first grammar written for a modern European language. According to a popular anecdote, when Nebrija presented it to Queen Isabella I , she asked him what was the use of such a work, and he answered that language is the instrument of empire. In his introduction to
7560-511: The Romance languages as a whole: The Latin system of four verb conjugations (form classes) is reduced to three in Spanish. The Latin infinitives with the endings -ĀRE, -ĒRE, and -ĪRE become Spanish infinitives in -ar , -er , and -ir respectively. The Latin third conjugation —infinitives ending in -ĔRE—are redistributed between the Spanish -er and -ir classes (e.g. facere → hacer , dicere → decir ). Spanish verbal morphology continues
7680-442: The Spanish lexicon contains loanwords from Basque , Hispano-Celtic ( Celtiberian and Gallaecian ), Iberian , Germanic ( Gothic ), Arabic and indigenous languages of the Americas . Accents—used in Modern Spanish to mark the vowel of the stressed syllable in words where stress is not predictable from rules—came into use sporadically in the 15th century, and massively in the 16th century. Their use began to be standardized with
7800-532: The Spanish Crown, the language was used as a tool for colonization by Spanish soldiers, missionaries, conquistadors, and entrepreneurs. In the coming centuries, their descendants continued to spread the language. Use of the language in the Americas was continued by descendants of the Spaniards: Spanish criollos and Mestizos . After the wars of independence fought by these colonies in the 19th century,
7920-453: The Spanish language refers primarily to lexical borrowing . Throughout its history, Spanish has accepted loanwords , first from pre-Roman languages (including Basque , Iberian , Celtiberian and Gallaecian ), and later from Greek , from Germanic languages , from Arabic , from neighboring Romance languages , from Native American languages , and from English . The most frequently used word that entered Spanish from (or through) Basque
8040-424: The Spanish-speaking world, Spanish is called not only español but also castellano (Castilian), the language from the Kingdom of Castile , contrasting it with other languages spoken in Spain such as Galician , Basque , Asturian , Catalan/Valencian , Aragonese , Occitan and other minor languages. The Spanish Constitution of 1978 uses the term castellano to define the official language of
8160-502: The U.S. population were of Hispanic or Hispanic American by origin. In turn, 41.8 million people in the United States aged five or older speak Spanish at home, or about 13% of the population. Spanish predominates in the unincorporated territory of Puerto Rico , where it is also an official language along with English. Spanish is by far the most common second language in the country, with over 50 million total speakers if non-native or second-language speakers are included. While English
8280-668: The United States ). A similar situation occurred in the American Southwest, including California , Arizona , New Mexico and Texas , where Spaniards, then criollos ( Tejanos , Californios , etc.) followed by Chicanos ( Mexican Americans ) and later Mexican immigrants, kept the Spanish language alive before, during and after the American appropriation of those territories following the Mexican–American War . Spanish continues to be used by millions of citizens and immigrants to
8400-528: The United States from Spanish-speaking countries of the Americas (for example, many Cubans arrived in Miami, Florida , beginning with the Cuban Revolution in 1959, 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. The presence of Spanish in Equatorial Guinea dates from
8520-399: The administration of Ferdinand Marcos two months later. It remained an official language until the ratification of the present constitution in 1987, in which it was re-designated as a voluntary and optional auxiliary language. Additionally, the constitution, in its Article XIV, stipulates that the Government shall provide the people of the Philippines with a Spanish-language translation of
8640-466: The administration), probably drawing from the speech of the upper classes of Toledo . Features associated with the Castilian patterns of Hispano-Romance also spread west and east to the kingdoms of León and Aragón for the rest of the middle ages, owing to the political prestige achieved by the Kingdom of Castile in the peninsular context and to the lesser literary development of their vernacular norms. From
8760-509: The advent of the Spanish Royal Academy in the 18th century. See also Spanish orthography . The standard Spanish language is also called Castilian in its original variant, and in order to distinguish it from other languages native to parts of Spain, such as Galician, Catalan, Basque, etc. In its earliest documented form, and up through approximately the 15th century, the language is customarily called Old Spanish . From approximately
8880-943: The alternate forms liar, leal, dedo and Old Spanish cruo and its Latin origin crūdus . An exemption to the rule: The retention of the d and g is due to the invalidity of the -ao , -aa , -oo, and -oa hiatuses in Old Spanish that would result from dropping it. In virtually all the Western Romance languages , the Latin voiceless stops — /p/ , /t/ , and /k/ , which are represented orthographically as P, T, and C (including Q) respectively—where they occurred in an "intervocalic" environment (qualified below), underwent one, two, or three successive stages of lenition , from voicing to spirantization to, in some cases, elision (deletion). In Spanish these three consonants generally undergo both voicing and spirantization , resulting in voiced fricatives : [ β ] , [ ð ] , and [ ɣ ] , respectively. Although it
9000-672: The classic hispanus or hispanicus took the suffix -one from Vulgar Latin , as happened with other words such as bretón (Breton) or sajón (Saxon). Like the other Romance languages , the Spanish language evolved from Vulgar Latin , which was brought to the Iberian Peninsula by the Romans during the Second Punic War , beginning in 210 BC. Several pre-Roman languages (also called Paleohispanic languages )—some distantly related to Latin as Indo-European languages , and some that are not related at all—were previously spoken in
9120-495: The consonant written b (a bilabial with plosive and fricative allophones). In modern Spanish, there is no difference between the pronunciation of orthographic b and v . Typical of Spanish (as also of neighboring Gascon extending as far north as the Gironde estuary , and found in a small area of Calabria ), attributed by some scholars to a Basque substratum was the mutation of Latin initial f into h- whenever it
9240-404: The country's constitution. In recent years changing attitudes among non-Spanish speaking Filipinos have helped spur a revival of the language, and starting in 2009 Spanish was reintroduced as part of the basic education curriculum in a number of public high schools, becoming the largest foreign language program offered by the public school system, with over 7,000 students studying the language in
9360-399: The first grammar of Spanish, Gramática de la lengua castellana , 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 . Because Old Spanish resembles the modern written language to a relatively high degree,
9480-399: The focus is on the action, whilst the present perfect is used for past actions when the focus is on the present state of the subject as a result of a previous action. This is somewhat similar to the English usage of the preterite and the present perfect. The past perfect is used in every German speaking country and it is used to place an action in the past before another action in the past. It
9600-613: The following table: Spanish is marked by palatalization of the Latin double consonants ( geminates ) nn and ll (thus Latin annum > Spanish año , and Latin anellum > Spanish anillo ). The consonant written u or v in Latin and pronounced [w] in Classical Latin had probably " fortified " to a bilabial fricative /β/ in Vulgar Latin. In early Spanish (but not in Catalan or Portuguese) it merged with
9720-466: The former British colony of Belize (known until 1973 as British Honduras ) where English is the sole official language, according to the 2022 census, 54% of the total population are able to speak the language. Due to its proximity to Spanish-speaking countries and small existing native Spanish speaking minority, Trinidad and Tobago has implemented Spanish language teaching into its education system. The Trinidadian and Tobagonian government launched
9840-584: The grammar, dated 18 August 1492, Nebrija wrote that "... language was always the companion of empire." From the 16th century onwards, the language was taken to the Spanish-discovered America and the Spanish East Indies via Spanish colonization of America . Miguel de Cervantes , author of Don Quixote , is such a well-known reference in the world that Spanish is often called la lengua de Cervantes ("the language of Cervantes"). In
9960-414: The history of Spanish refers to the loss of an unstressed vowel from the syllable immediately preceding or following the stressed syllable. Early in its history, Spanish lost such vowels where they preceded or followed R or L, and between S and T. * Solitario , which is derived from sōlitārium , is a learned word; cf. the alternate form soltero . As also "fábula" from "fabulam", although this last one has
10080-535: The language's hegemony in an intensely centralising Spanish state were established from the 18th century onward. Other European territories in which it is also widely spoken include Gibraltar and Andorra . Spanish is also spoken by immigrant communities in other European countries, such as the United Kingdom , France , Italy , and Germany . Spanish is an official language of the European Union . Today,
10200-471: 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), in his court in Toledo . 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
10320-504: The late 18th century, and it was adopted as the official language when independence was granted in 1968. Spanish is widely spoken in Western Sahara , which was a protectorate/colony of Spain from the 1880s to the 1970s. In 1492 Spain expelled its Jewish population. Their Judaeo-Spanish language, called Ladino, developed along its own lines and continues to be spoken by a dwindling number of speakers, mainly in Israel, Turkey, and Greece. In
10440-516: The latter, a synthetic pluperfect exists which follows the imperfect conjugations, but -ra replaces the -va seen in the verb endings. While in Semitic languages tripartite non-past/past imperfective/past perfective systems similar to those of most Indo-European languages are found, in the rest of Africa past tenses have very different forms from those found in European languages. Berber languages have only
10560-405: The loanwords came from was Classical Latin , but also Renaissance Latin , the form of Latin used in original works of the time. Spanish shares with other Romance languages most of the phonological and grammatical changes that characterized Vulgar Latin , such as the abandonment of distinctive vowel length , the loss of the case system for nouns, and the loss of deponent verbs . Syncope in
10680-686: The majority of the Spanish speakers live in Hispanic America . Nationally, Spanish is the official language—either de facto or de jure —of Argentina , Bolivia (co-official with 36 indigenous languages), Chile , Colombia , Costa Rica , Cuba , Dominican Republic , Ecuador , El Salvador , Guatemala , Honduras , Mexico (co-official with 63 indigenous languages), Nicaragua , Panama , Paraguay (co-official with Guaraní ), Peru (co-official with Quechua , Aymara , and "the other indigenous languages"), Puerto Rico (co-official with English), Uruguay , and Venezuela . Spanish language has
10800-452: The modal verbs and the verbs haben (have) and sein (be). In speech and informal writing, the Perfekt is used (e.g., Ich habe dies und das gesagt . (I said this and that)). However, in the oral mode of North Germany, there is still a very important difference between the preterite and the perfect , and both tenses are consequently very common. The preterite is used for past actions when
10920-537: The new ruling elites extended their Spanish to the whole population, including the Amerindian majority, to strengthen national unity, and nowadays it is the first and official language of the resulting republics, except in very isolated parts of the former Spanish colonies. In the late 19th century, the still-Spanish colonies of Cuba and Puerto Rico encouraged more immigrants from Spain, and similarly other Spanish-speaking countries such as Argentina , Uruguay , and to
11040-711: The northwest of the African mainland. The Spanish spoken in the Canary Islands traces its origins back to the Castilian conquest in the 15th century , and, in addition to a resemblance to Western Andalusian speech patterns, it also features strong influence from the Spanish varieties spoken in the Americas, which in turn have also been influenced historically by Canarian Spanish. The Spanish spoken in North Africa by native bilingual speakers of Arabic or Berber who also speak Spanish as
11160-636: The other hand, currently uses the term español in its publications. However, from 1713 to 1923, it called the language castellano . The Diccionario panhispánico de dudas (a language guide published by the Royal Spanish Academy) states that, although the Royal Spanish Academy prefers to use the term español in its publications when referring to the Spanish language, both terms— español and castellano —are regarded as synonymous and equally valid. The term castellano
11280-435: The past tense is sometimes used in referring to hypothetical situations, such as in condition clauses like If you loved me ... , where the past tense loved is used even though there may be no connection with past time. Some languages grammatically distinguish the recent past from remote past with separate tenses. There may be more than two distinctions. In some languages, certain past tenses can carry an implication that
11400-469: The past tense with the invariant pre-verbal marker wen or bin (especially older speakers) or haed (especially on the island Kauai). ( Ai wen si om "I saw him"; Ai bin klin ap mai ples for da halade "I cleaned up my place for the holiday"; De haed plei BYU laes wik "They played BYU last week"). The past habitual marker is yustu ( Yo mada yustu tink so "Your mother used to think so"). Haitian Creole can indicate past tense with
11520-503: The past, although use can also be made of the tense/aspect markers le and guo . The "past time" to which the past tense refers generally means the past relative to the moment of speaking, although in contexts where relative tense is employed (as in some instances of indirect speech ) it may mean the past relative to some other time being under discussion. A language's past tense may also have other uses besides referring to past time; for example, in English and certain other languages,
11640-400: The perfective/imperfective distinction and lack a past imperfect. Many non-Bantu Niger–Congo languages of West Africa do not mark past tense at all but instead have a form of perfect derived from a word meaning "to finish". Others, such as Ewe , distinguish only between future and non-future . In complete contrast, Bantu languages such as Zulu have not only a past tense, but also
11760-529: The population. Many northern Moroccans have rudimentary knowledge of Spanish, with Spanish being particularly significant in areas adjacent to Ceuta and Melilla. Spanish also has a presence in the education system of the country (through either selected education centers implementing Spain's education system, primarily located in the North, or the availability of Spanish as foreign language subject in secondary education). In Western Sahara , formerly Spanish Sahara ,
11880-535: The result of the action in question no longer holds. For example, in the Bantu language Chichewa , use of the remote past tense ánáamwalíra "he died" would be surprising since it would imply that the person was no longer dead. This kind of past tense is known as discontinuous past . Similarly certain imperfective past tenses (such as the English "used to") can carry an implication that the action referred to no longer takes place. A general past tense can be indicated with
12000-759: The same area with inflectional past-marking that extends into Europe, whereas more westerly Nilo-Saharan languages often do not have past tense. Past tenses are found in a variety of Asian languages. These include the Indo-European languages Russian in North Asia and Persian , Urdu , Nepali and Hindi in Southwest and South Asia; the Turkic languages Turkish , Turkmen , Kazakh , and Uyghur of Southwest and Central Asia; Arabic and Hebrew in Southwest Asia; Japanese ;
12120-568: The southward territorial expansion of the Kingdom of Castile , Hispano-Romance norms associated to this polity displaced both Arabic and the Mozarabic romance varieties in the conquered territories, even though the resulting speech also assimilated features from the latter in the process. The first standard written norm of Spanish was brought forward in the 13th century by Alfonso X the Wise (who used Castilian , i.e. Spanish, along with Latin as languages of
12240-488: The spoken Latin that became Spanish. Additionally, many Greek words formed part of the language of the Church. Spanish also borrowed Ancient Greek vocabulary in the areas of medical, technical, and scientific language, beginning as early as the 13th century. The influence of Germanic languages is very little on phonological development, but rather is found mainly in the Spanish lexicon . Words of Germanic origin are common in all varieties of Spanish. The modern words for
12360-528: The term español (Spanish). According to the Royal Spanish Academy, español derives from the Occitan word espaignol and that, in turn, derives from the Vulgar Latin * hispaniolus ('of Hispania'). Hispania was the Roman name for the entire Iberian Peninsula . There are other hypotheses apart from the one suggested by the Royal Spanish Academy. Spanish philologist Ramón Menéndez Pidal suggested that
12480-444: The theories of Ramón Menéndez Pidal , local sociolects of Vulgar Latin evolved into Spanish, in the north of Iberia, in an area centered in the city of Burgos , and this dialect was later brought to the city of Toledo , where the written standard of Spanish was first developed, in the 13th century. In this formative stage, Spanish developed a strongly differing variant from its close cousin, Leonese , and, according to some authors,
12600-522: The third most used language on the Internet , after English and Chinese. Spanish is the official language of Spain . Upon the emergence of the Castilian Crown as the dominant power in the Iberian Peninsula by the end of the Middle Ages, the Romance vernacular associated with this polity became increasingly used in instances of prestige and influence, and the distinction between "Castilian" and "Spanish" started to become blurred. Hard policies imposing
12720-453: The usage of the various constructions used to refer to the past, see Uses of English verb forms . The past tense is also used in referring to some hypothetical situations, not necessarily connected with past time, as in if I tried or I wish I knew . (For the possible use of were in place of was in such instances, see English subjunctive .) German uses three forms for the past tense. In southern Germany , Austria and Switzerland ,
12840-459: The use of some Latin synthetic forms that were replaced by analytic ones in spoken French and (partly) Italian (cf. Sp. lavó , Fr. il a lavé ), and the Spanish subjunctive mood maintains separate present and past-tense forms. Spanish syntax provides overt marking for some direct objects (the so-called "personal a ", see differential object marking for the general phenomenon), and uses clitic doubling with indirect objects, in which
12960-590: The variety spoken in the city of Toledo around the 13th century became the basis for the written standard. With the Reconquista , this northern dialect spread to the south, where it almost entirely replaced or absorbed the local Romance dialects, at the same time as it borrowed many words from Andalusi Arabic and was influenced by Mozarabic (the Romance speech of Christians living in Moorish territory ) and medieval Judaeo-Spanish (Ladino). These languages had vanished in
13080-508: The verb, which changes the ending to indicate the past tense, while non-inflected languages may use other words meaning, for example, "yesterday" or "last week" to indicate that something took place in the past. In some languages, the grammatical expression of past tense is combined with the expression of other categories such as grammatical aspect (see tense–aspect ). Thus a language may have several types of past tense form, their use depending on what aspectual or other additional information
13200-581: The whole of Spain, in contrast to las demás lenguas españolas (lit. "the other Spanish languages "). Article III reads as follows: El castellano es la lengua española oficial del Estado. ... Las demás lenguas españolas serán también oficiales en las respectivas Comunidades Autónomas... Castilian is the official Spanish language of the State. ... The other Spanish languages shall also be official in their respective Autonomous Communities... The Royal Spanish Academy ( Real Academia Española ), on
13320-867: The workplace, 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 , Balearic Islands and Valencia ; Basque for the Basque provinces and Navarre , and Galician for Galicia . Since 1975, following the death of Franco , Spain has become a multi-party democracy and decentralized country, constituted in autonomous communities . Under this system, some languages of Spain —such as Aranese (an Occitan language of northwestern Catalonia), Basque, Catalan/Valencian, and Galician—have gained co-official status in their respective geographical areas. Others—such as Aragonese , Asturian and Leonese —have been recognized by regional governments. When
13440-582: The world. Spanish is well represented in the humanities and social sciences . Spanish is also the third most used language on the internet by number of users after English and Chinese and the second most used language by number of websites after English. Spanish is used as an official language by many international organizations , including the United Nations , European Union , Organization of American States , Union of South American Nations , Community of Latin American and Caribbean States , African Union , among others. In Spain and some other parts of
13560-700: Was oriente (or levante ), and "west" was occidente (or poniente ). These older words for "east" and "west" continue to have some use in Modern Spanish. In 711 the Iberian Peninsula was invaded by Moors , who brought in the Arabic language . For about eight hundred years, until the fall of the Emirate of Granada (1492), Spanish borrowed thousands of words from Andalusi Arabic and Andalusi Romance , such as alcalde "mayor", álgebra "algebra", aceite "oil", zanahoria "carrot", alquiler "rent", achacar "to blame", adelfa "oleander", barrio "neighbourhood", chaleco "vest", to name just
13680-581: Was developed in the cities of Toledo , in the 13th to 16th centuries, and Madrid , from the 1570s. The development of the Spanish sound system from that of Vulgar Latin exhibits most of the changes that are typical of Western Romance languages , including lenition of intervocalic consonants (thus Latin vīta > Spanish vida ). The diphthongization of Latin stressed short e and o —which occurred in open syllables in French and Italian, but not at all in Catalan or Portuguese—is found in both open and closed syllables in Spanish, as shown in
13800-556: Was distinguished by a heavy Basque influence (see Iberian Romance languages ). This distinctive dialect spread to southern Spain with the advance of the Reconquista , and meanwhile gathered a sizable lexical influence from the Arabic of Al-Andalus , much of it indirectly, through the Romance Mozarabic dialects (some 4,000 Arabic -derived words, make up around 8% of the language today). The written standard for this new language
13920-548: Was doing...". Similar patterns extend across most languages of the Indo-European family right through to the Indic languages . Unlike other Indo-European languages, in Slavic languages tense is independent of aspect , with imperfective and perfective aspects being indicated instead by means of prefixes, stem changes, or suppletion . In many West Slavic and East Slavic languages, the early Slavic past tenses have largely merged into
14040-713: Was followed by a vowel that did not diphthongize. The h- , still preserved in spelling, is now silent in most varieties of the language, although in some Andalusian and Caribbean dialects, it is still aspirated in some words. Because of borrowings from Latin and neighboring Romance languages, there are many f -/ h - doublets in modern Spanish: Fernando and Hernando (both Spanish for "Ferdinand"), ferrero and herrero (both Spanish for "smith"), fierro and hierro (both Spanish for "iron"), and fondo and hondo (both words pertaining to depth in Spanish, though fondo means "bottom", while hondo means "deep"); additionally, hacer ("to make")
14160-954: Was once speculated that this change came about as a transfer of phonological features from substrate Celtic and Basque languages, which were in geographical proximity to Iberian Vulgar Latin (see Sprachbund ), it is now widely recognized that such change is a natural internal development. Intervocalic /p/ , /t/ , and /k/ reappeared in Spanish through learned words from Classical Latin and also appeared in Spanish through consonant cluster simplification from Vulgar Latin (see below), and Latin voiced stops— /b/ , /d/ , and /ɡ/ , which are represented orthographically as B, D, and G respectively—and also occurred in intervocalic positions also underwent lenition : [ β ] , [ ð ] , and [ ɣ ] , but appeared in Spanish also through learned words from Classical Latin and also appeared in Spanish through consonant cluster simplification from Vulgar Latin. The phonological environment of these changes
14280-462: Was revoked by Michel Temer after the impeachment of Dilma Rousseff . In many border towns and villages along Paraguay and Uruguay, a mixed language known as Portuñol is spoken. Equatorial Guinea is the only Spanish-speaking country located entirely in Africa, with the language introduced during the Spanish colonial period . Enshrined in the constitution as an official language (alongside French and Portuguese), Spanish features prominently in
14400-719: Was traditionally considered to have appeared in the Glosas Emilianenses located in San Millán de la Cogolla , La Rioja . These are "glosses" (translations of isolated words and phrases in a form more like Hispanic Romance than Latin) added between the lines of a manuscript that was written earlier in Latin. Nowadays the language of the Glosas Emilianenses is considered to be closer to the Navarro-Aragonese language than to Spanish proper. Estimates of their date vary from
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