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Spanish () is a Romance language originally from the northern area of Spain. It is the only official language covering the entirety of Spain, most Latin American countries and one of the official languages of Equatorial Guinea. In total, twenty-five nations and territories use Spanish as their primary language. In addition, it is an important language in twenty other countries.
Spanish originated as a Latin dialect along the remote cross road strips among the Cantabria, Burgos, Soria and La Rioja provinces of Northern 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 brought to the Americas and other parts of the world in the last five centuries by Spanish explorers and colonists.
The language was spoken by roughly 364 million people worldwide in the year 2000, making Spanish the 2nd most popular Romance language after French [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] and the second to fifth most spoken language by number of native speakers.[6][7][8] It is estimated that the combined total of native and non-native Spanish speakers is 400–500 million, probably making it the third most spoken language by total number of speakers.[9][10]
Spanish is also one of six official working languages of the United Nations and one of the most used global languages. It is spoken most extensively in the Americas, Spain and to a small extent in Africa and Asia Pacific. It is also the second most widely spoken language in the United States[11] and arguably the most popular foreign language for study in US schools and Universities.[12][13] Within the globalized market, there is currently an international expansion and recognition of the Spanish language in literature, the film industry, television (notably telenovelas) and music.
Spanish people tend to call this language when contrasting it with languages of foreign states, such as French and English, but call it , i.e. Castilian, the language of the Castile region, when contrasting it with other languages of Spain (such as Galician, Basque, and Catalan). In this manner, the Spanish Constitution of 1978 uses the term to define the official language of the whole State, as opposed to (lit. the other Spanish languages). Article III reads as follows:
Castilian is the official Spanish language of the State. (…) The other Spanish languages shall also be official in their respective Autonomous Communities…
Some philologists use "Castilian" only when speaking of the language spoken in Castile during the Middle Ages, stating that it is preferable to use "Spanish" for its modern form. The subdialect of Spanish spoken in northern parts of modern day Castile is also called "Castilian" sometimes. This dialect differs from those of other regions of Spain (Andalusia or Madrid for example); the Castilian dialect is conventionally considered in Spain to be the same as standard Spanish.
The name castellano is however widely used for the language as a whole in Latin America. Some Spanish speakers consider a generic term with no political or ideological links, much as "Spanish" is in English.
Spanish/Castilian has closest affinity to the other West Iberian Romance languages: Asturian (), Galician (), Ladino (, ), and Portuguese (), as well as to Aragonese () and Catalan (). Most of these are mutually intelligible among speakers without too much difficulty.
Catalan, an East-Iberian language which exhibits many Gallo-Romance traits, is more similar to the neighbouring Occitan language () than Spanish and Portuguese are to each other. Spanish and Portuguese share similar grammars and a majority of vocabulary as well as a common history of Arabic influence while a great part of the peninsula was under Islamic rule (both languages expanded over Islamic territories). Their lexical similarity is estimated at 89%.[14] See Differences between Spanish and Portuguese, for further information.
Ladino, which is essentially medieval Castilian and closer to modern Spanish than any other language, is spoken by many descendants of the Sephardic Jews who were expelled from Spain in the 15th century. In many ways it is not a separate language but a dialect of Castilian. Ladino lacks native American vocabulary which was influential during colonial times. It does contain other vocabulary from Turkish, Hebrew and from other languages spoken wherever the Sephardis settled.
Spanish and Italian share a very similar phonological system and do not differ very much in grammar, vocabulary and above all morphology. Speakers of both languages can communicate relatively well: at present, the lexical similarity with Italian is estimated at 82%.[14] As a result, Spanish and Italian are mutually intelligible to various degrees. Spanish is mutually intelligible with French and with Romanian to a lesser degree (lexical similarity is respectively 75% and 71%[14]). The writing systems of the four languages allow for a greater amount of interlingual reading comprehension than oral communication would.
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One defining characteristic of Spanish was the diphthongization of the Latin short vowels e and o into ie and ue, respectively, when they were stressed. Similar sound changes can be found in other Romance languages, but in Spanish they were particularly significant. Some examples:
More peculiar to early Spanish (as in the Gascon dialect of Occitan, and possibly due to a Basque substratum) was the mutation of Latin initial f- into h- whenever it was followed by a vowel which did not diphthongate. Compare for instance:
Some consonant clusters of Latin also produced characteristicaly different results in these languages, for example:
The Spanish language developed from Vulgar Latin, with influence from Celtiberian, Basque and Arabic, in the north of the Iberian Peninsula (see Iberian Romance languages). Typical features of Spanish diachronical phonology include lenition (Latin , Spanish ), palatalization (Latin , Spanish ) and diphthongation (stem-changing) of short e and o from Vulgar Latin (Latin , Spanish ; Latin , Spanish ). Similar phenomena can be found in other Romance languages as well.
During the , this northern dialect from Cantabria was carried south, and indeed is still a minority language in the northern coastal regions of Morocco.
The first Latin to Spanish grammar () was written in Salamanca, Spain, in 1492 by Elio Antonio de Nebrija. When Isabel de Castilla was presented with the book, she asked, What do I want a work like this for, if I already know the language?, to which he replied, Your highness, the language is the instrument of the Empire.
From the 16th century onwards, the language was brought to the Americas, Federated States of Micronesia, Guam, Marianas, Palau, and the Philippines by Spanish colonization. Also in this epoch, Spanish became the main language of Politics and Art across the major part of Europe. In the 18th century, French took its place.
In the 20th century, Spanish was introduced in Equatorial Guinea and Western Sahara and parts of the United States, such as Spanish Harlem in New York City, that had not been part of the Spanish Empire.
For details on borrowed words and other external influences in Spanish, see Influences on the Spanish language.
Spanish is one of the official languages of the Organization of American States, the United Nations, the Union of South American Nations, and the European Union.
With approximately 106 million first-language and second-language speakers, Mexico boasts the largest population of Spanish-speakers in the world. The three next largest Spanish-speaking populations reside in Colombia, Spain and Argentina.
Spanish is the official language in 20 countries: Argentina, Bolivia (co-official Quechua and Aymara), 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 Aymara), Spain (co-official in some regions with Catalan, Galician and Basque), Uruguay, Venezuela, and the U.S. Territory Puerto Rico (co-official English).
The vast majority of its speakers are located in Spain and the Western Hemisphere.
Spanish holds no official recognition in the former British colony of Belize. However, it is the native tongue of about 40% of the population, and is spoken as a second language by another 15%.[15][16] It is mainly spoken by Hispanic descendants who have remained in the region since the 17th century. However, English remains the sole official language.[17]
Spanish has become increasingly important in Brazil due to proximity and increased trade with its Spanish-speaking neighbors (for example, as a member of the Mercosur trading bloc).[18] In 2005, the National Congress of Brazil approved a bill, signed into law by the President, that makes Spanish available as a foreign language in the country's secondary schools.[19] In many border towns and villages (especially along the Uruguayan-Brazilian border) a mixed language commonly known as Portuñol is also spoken.[20]
In the United States, 42.7 million people are Hispanics according to the 2005 census. Some 32 million people (12% of the whole population) aged 5 years or older speak Spanish at home.[21] While this may be due to immigration, Spanish is also the most widely taught foreign language.[22] In total, the U.S. contains the world's fifth-largest Spanish speaking population.[23]
Spanish is an official language of the European Union. In European countries other than Spain, it is spoken in communities in the United Kingdom, France, and Germany, and an important language of business communication for those countries as well.[24][25] It is also spoken widely in Gibraltar, although English is used for official purposes.[26] Likewise, it is spoken in Andorra though Catalan is the official language.[27][28] Spanish also shares a strong lexical similarity with its sister Romance languages of Italian and Portuguese, and may be mutually intelligible on a small scale with those languages within Italy and Portugal.[29]
Although Spanish was an official language in the Philippines for over three centuries, it was never spoken by the majority of the population. Its importance fell in the first half of the 20th century following the US occupation and administration of the islands. The introduction of the English language in the Filipino government system put an end to use of Spanish as the official language. The language lost its status in 1987, during the Corazon Aquino administration. According to the 1990 census, there were 2,658 native speakers of Spanish.[30] The number of Spanish speakers, however, are not available in the ensuing 1995 and 2000 censuses. Additionally, according to the 2000 census, there are over 600,000 native speakers of Chavacano, a Spanish based creole spoken in Cavite and Zamboanga. Many Philippine languages have numerous Spanish loanwords. See Also: Spanish language in the Philippines.
Spanish is also spoken by about 50,000 Japanese Peruvian expatriates living in Japan.[31]
In Africa, Spanish is spoken in Canary Islands, an autonomous community of Spain. It is also spoken in the Spanish territories of Peñón de Alhucemas, Isla Perejil, Ceuta, the Chafarinas Islands, Melilla, and Peñón de Vélez de la Gomera, some of which are contested with Morocco. It is co-official with French in Equatorial Guinea, a small country of 500,000 people, where it is the prevalent language.[32]. In Morocco, a former Spanish colony that is also geographically close to Spain, approximately 20,000 people speak Spanish.[33]
Among the countries and territories in Oceania, Spanish is also spoken by 3,000 inhabitants of Easter Island, a territorial possession of Chile. According to the 2001 census, there are approximately 95,000 speakers of Spanish in Australia, 44,000 of which live in Greater Sydney.[34]
The island nations of Guam, Palau, Northern Marianas, Marshall Islands and Federated States of Micronesia all once had Spanish speakers, since Marianas and Caroline Islands were Hispanic colonial possesions until late 19th century (see Spanish-American War), but Spanish has long since been forgotten. It now only exists as an influence on the local native languages.
In Antarctica, the territorial claims and permanent bases made by Argentina and Chile also place Spanish as the official and working language of these exclaves.
The following is a list of the numbers of estimated Spanish speakers in different regions of the world where Spanish has or once had a strong presence.
a) Estimated statistics provided on behalf of the "Instituto Cervantes de Manila", "Education Council and Embassy of Spain in Manila" (Consejería de Educación de la Embajada de España en Manila) in 2006 and the Philippine Academy of the Spanish Language " (Academia Filipina de Lengua Española) in 2006.
The following is a list of the numbers of estimated Spanish speakers in different regions of the world where Spanish is a minority language.
(b) Only includes people of 5 years of age and older. Also, people who use the language at work or other settings but not at home are not included[35]
(c) Although part of the Spanish Empire, Arabic language and Arabic culture remains the dominant cultural production in Western Sahara. Spanish is only spoken by expatriate Spanish speakers and people of Spanish ancestry.
There are important variations among the regions of Spain and throughout Spanish-speaking America. In Spain the Castilian dialect pronunciation is commonly regarded as the national standard, although the characteristic weak pronouns usage called [[Loísmo|]] of this dialect is deprecated. More accurately, for nearly everyone in Spain, "standard Spanish" means "pronouncing everything exactly as it is written", an ideal which does not correspond to any real dialect, though the northern dialects get the closest to it. In practice, the standard way of speaking Spanish in the media is "written Spanish" for formal speech, "Madrid dialect" (one of the transitional variants between Castilian and Andalusian) for informal speech.
Spanish has three second-person singular pronouns: , , and in some parts of Latin America, (the use of this form is called voseo). Generally speaking, and are informal and used with friends (though in Spain is considered an archaic form for address of exalted personages, its use now mainly confined to the liturgy). is universally regarded as the formal address (derived from , "your grace") , and is used as a mark of respect, as when addressing one's elders or strangers.
is used extensively as the primary spoken form of the second-person singular pronoun in many countries of Latin America, including Argentina, Costa Rica, the central mountain region of Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Paraguay, Uruguay, the Antioquia and Valle del Cauca states of Colombia and the State of Zulia in Venezuela. In Argentina, Uruguay, and increasingly in Paraguay, it is also the standard form used in the media, but the media in other countries with generally continue to use or except in advertisements, for instance. may also be used regionally in other countries. Depending on country or region, usage may be considered standard or (by better educated speakers) to be unrefined. Interpersonal situations in which the use of vos is acceptable may also differ considerably between regions. For further information, see Voseo.
Spanish forms also differ regarding second-person plural pronouns. The Spanish dialects of Latin America have only one form of the second-person plural, (formal or familiar, as the case may be). In Spain there are two forms — (formal) and (familiar). The pronoun is the plural form of in most of Spain, but in the Americas (and certain southern Spanish cities such as Cádiz, and in the Canary Islands) it is replaced with . It is remarkable that the use of for the informal plural "you" in southern Spain does not follow the usual rule for pronoun-verb agreement; e.g., while the formal form for "you go", , uses the third-person plural form of the verb, in Cádiz the informal form is constructed as , using the second-person plural of the verb. In the Canary Islands, though, the usual pronoun-verb agreement is preserved in most cases.
Some words can be different, even embarrassingly so, in different Hispanophone countries. Most Spanish speakers can recognize other Spanish forms, even in places where they are not commonly used, but Spaniards generally do not recognise specifically American usages. For example, Spanish mantequilla, aguacate and albaricoque (respectively, "butter", "avocado", "apricot") correspond to manteca, palta, and damasco, respectively, in Argentina, Chile and Uruguay. The everyday Spanish words coger (to catch, get, or pick up), pisar (to step on) and concha (seashell) are considered extremely rude in parts of Latin America, where the meaning of coger and pisar is also "to have sex" and concha means "vagina". The Puerto Rican word for "bobby pin" (pinche) is an obscenity in Mexico, and in Nicaragua simply means stingy. Other examples include taco, which means "swearword" in Spain but is known to the rest of the world as the Mexican foodstuff. Pija in many countries of Latin America is an obscene slang word for penis, while in Spain the word signifies "posh girl" or "snobby". Coche, which means car in Spain, means pig in Guatemala while carro means "car" in some Latin American countries and "cart" in others as well as in Spain.
The (Royal Spanish Academy), together with the 21 other national ones (see Association of Spanish Language Academies), exercises a standardizing influence through its publication of dictionaries and widely respected grammar and style guides. Due to this influence and for other sociohistorical reasons, a standardized form of the language (Standard Spanish) is widely acknowledged for use in literature, academic contexts and the media.
Spanish is written using the Latin alphabet, with the addition of the character "ñ" (eñe), which represents the phoneme and is regarded as a letter of its own distinct from "n", despite being typographically an "n" with a tilde. Historically, the digraphs "ch" () and "ll" () were regarded as single letters, with their own names and places in the alphabet, because each represents a single phoneme ( and , respectively). However, the digraph "rr" (, double "r", or simply as opposed to ), which also represents a single phoneme , was not similarly regarded as a single letter. Thus, the traditional Spanish alphabet had 28 letters (29 if one counted "w", which is only used in foreign names and loanwords):
a, b, c, ch, d, e, f, g, h, i, j, k, l, ll, m, n, ñ, o, p, q, r, s, t, u, v, (w), x, y, z.
Since 1994, the two digraphs are to be treated as letter pairs for collation purposes. Words with "ch" are now alphabetically sorted between those with "ce" and "ci", instead of following "cz" as they used to, and similarly for "ll". However, the names che, and elle are still used colloquially.
With the exclusion of a very small number of regional terms such as México (see Mexico: Toponymy), pronunciation can be entirely determined from spelling. A typical Spanish word is stressed on the syllable before the last if it ends with a vowel (not including y) or with a vowel followed by n or s; it is stressed on the last syllable otherwise. Exceptions to this rule are indicated by placing an acute accent on the stressed vowel.
The acute accent is used, in addition, to distinguish between certain homophones, especially when one of them is a stressed word and the other one is a clitic: compare ("the", masculine singular definite article) with ("he" or "it"), or ("you", object pronoun), (preposition "of" or "from"), and (reflexive pronoun) with ("tea"), ("give") and ("I know", or imperative "be").
The interrogative pronouns (, , , , etc.) also receive accents in direct or indirect questions, and some demonstratives (, , , etc.) can be accented when used as pronouns. The conjunction ("or") is written with an accent between numerals so as not to be confused with a zero: e.g., should be read as rather than ("10, 020"). Accent marks are frequently omitted in capital letters (a widespread practice in the early days of computers where only lowercase vowels were available with accents), although the RAE advises against this.
In rare cases, "u" is written with a diaeresis ("ü") when it comes between "g" and a front vowel ("e" or "i"), to indicate that it should be pronounced, rather than silent as usual (e.g., cigüeña, "stork", is pronounced ; if it were written cigueña, it would be pronounced ).
Interrogative and exclamatory clauses are introduced with inverted question ( ¿ ) and exclamation marks ( ¡ ).
The phonemic inventory listed in the following table includes phonemes that are preserved only in some dialects, other dialects have merged them (such as yeísmo); these are marked with an asterisk (*). Sounds in parentheses are allophones or dialectal variants.
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By the 16th century, the consonant system of Spanish underwent the following important changes that differentiated it from neighboring Romance languages such as Portuguese and Catalan:
The consonant system of Medieval Spanish has been better preserved in Ladino and in Portuguese, neither of which underwent these shifts.
Spanish has a phonemic stress system — stress is not fixed, and different stress patterns can result in separate meanings for one and the same word. Spanish makes abundant use of this feature, especially in distinguishing verb conjugation forms. For example, the word (with penultimate stress) means "road" or "I walk" whereas (with final stress) means "you (formal)/he/she/it walked". Another example is the word (first-syllable stress) "practical", which is different from (second-syllable stress) "I practice," and (last-syllable stress) "you (formal)/he/she/it practiced." Also, since Spanish syllables are all pronounced at a more or less constant tempo, the language is said to be syllable-timed.
As mentioned above, stress can always be predicted from the written form of a word. An amusing example of the significance of stress and intonation in Spanish is the riddle , to be punctuated and accented so that it makes sense. The answer is ("What do you mean / 'how / do I eat'? / I eat / the way / I eat!").
Spanish is a relatively inflected language, with a two-gender system and about fifty conjugated forms per verb, but limited inflection of nouns, adjectives, and determiners. (For a detailed overview of verbs, see Spanish verbs and Spanish irregular verbs.)
It is right-branching, uses prepositions, and usually places adjectives after nouns. Its syntax is generally Subject Verb Object, though variations are common. It is a pro-drop language (allows the deletion of pronouns when pragmatically unnecessary) and verb-framed.
()ішпанская мова
(S)e-pan-gâ-gí ()spanū ruoda
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