Spanish language Totally Explained

Spanish or Castilian (castellano) is a Romance language originally from the northern area of Spain. From there, its use gradually spread inside the Kingdom of Castile, where it evolved and eventually became the principal language of the government and trade. It was later taken to Africa, the Americas and Asia Pacific in the last five centuries by Spanish explorers and colonists.
Today, it's the official language of Spain, most Latin American countries, and Equatorial Guinea. In total, 21 nations use Spanish as their primary language. Spanish is also one of six official languages of the United Nations.
The language is spoken by between 322 and 400 million people natively, making Spanish the most spoken Romance language and possibly the second most spoken language by number of native speakers. It is also the second most widely spoken language in the United States and by far the most popular studied foreign language in U.S. schools and universities. It is estimated that the combined total of native and non-native Spanish speakers is approximately 500 million, likely making it the fourth most spoken language by total number of speakers.

Naming and origin

Spaniards tend to call this language (Spanish) when contrasting it with languages of foreign states, such as French and English, but call it (Castilian), that is, the language of the Castile region, when contrasting it with other languages spoken in Spain such as Galician, Basque, and Catalan. This reasoning also holds true for the language's preferred name in some Hispanic American countries. In this manner, the Spanish Constitution of 1978 uses the term to define the official language of the whole Spanish State, as opposed to (lit. the other Spanish languages). Article III reads as follows:
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Castilian is the official Spanish language of the State. (…) The other Spanish languages shall also be official in their respective Autonomous Communities…
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. Often Latin Americans use it to differentiate their own variety of Spanish as opposed to the variety of Spanish spoken in Spain, or vice-versa, to refer to that variety of Spanish which is considered as standard in the region.

Classification and related languages

Castilian Spanish has closest affinity to the other West Iberian Romance languages: Asturian, Galician, Ladino, and Portuguese, as well as to Aragonese and Catalan .
Catalan, an East Iberian language which exhibits many Gallo-Romance traits, is more similar to the neighbouring Occitan language than to Spanish, or indeed than Spanish and Portuguese are to each other. In the Middle Ages, it was even known as llemosí (Limousin). In later centuries it was generally regarded as a dialect of Spanish, and it wasn't until the earliest years of the 20th century that Catalan was recognised as a variant of the Occitan language.
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 has been estimated as 89%. As a result, Spanish and Italian are mutually intelligible to various degrees. The lexical similarity with Portuguese is even greater, 89%, but the vagaries of Portuguese pronunciation make it less easily understood by Hispanophones than Italian. Mutual intelligibility with French and Romanian is even lower (lexical similarity being respectively 75% and 71%), Peru (co-official Quechua and, in some regions, Aymara), Uruguay, and Venezuela. Spanish is also the official language (co-official language English) in the U.S. commonwealth of Puerto Rico..

The non-Spanish speaking American nations

Spanish holds no official recognition in the former British colony of Belize. However, according to the 2000 census, 52.1% of the population speaks the language "very well." It is mainly spoken by Hispanic descendants who have remained in the region since the 17th century. However, English remains the sole official language.
Spanish has become increasingly important in Brazil due to proximity and increased trade with its Spanish-speaking neighbours, for example, as a member of the Mercosur trading bloc. 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. In many border towns and villages (especially along the Uruguayan-Brazilian border) a mixed language commonly known as Portuñol is also spoken.
In the United States, 42.7 million people were of Hispanic heritage according to the 2005 census. Some 32 million people, or 12% of the whole population aged 5 years or older speak Spanish at home. The Spanish language has a long history in the United States (many states from the south used to be part of Mexico) and has recently been revitalised by heavy immigration from Spanish-speaking Latin America. Spanish, moreover, is also the most widely taught foreign language in the United States. Though the United States has no formally designated "official languages," Spanish is formally recognized at the state level, alongside English, in the U.S. state of New Mexico, where it's spoken by almost 30% of the population. In total, the U.S. contains the world's fifth-largest Spanish speaking population.

Europe

Spanish is official in Spain, the country for which it's named and from which it originated. It is also spoken widely in Gibraltar, although English is used for official purposes. Likewise, it's spoken in Andorra though Catalan is the official language. It is also spoken by small communities in other European countries, such as the United Kingdom, France, and Germany. Spanish is an official language of the European Union. In Switzerland, Spanish is the mother tongue of 1.7% of the population, representing the first minority after the 4 official languages of the country .

Asia

Although Spanish was an official language in the Philippines, it was never spoken by a 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 the 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. 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.

Africa

In Africa, Spanish language is official in the UN-recognised but Moroccan-occupied Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic (co-official Arabic) and Equatorial Guinea (co-official French and Portuguese). Today, nearly 200,000 refugee Sahrawis are able to read and write in Spanish, and several thousands have received university education in foreign countries as part of aid packages (mainly Cuba and Spain). In Equatorial Guinea, Spanish is the predominant language when counting native and non-native speakers (around 500,000 people), while Fang is the most spoken language by number of native speakers, . It is also spoken in the Spanish cities in continental North Africa (Ceuta and Melilla) and in the autonomous community of Canary Islands (143,000 and 1,995,833 people, respectively). Within Nothern Morocco, a former Franco-Spanish protectorate that's also geographically close to Spain, approximately 20,000 people speak Spanish.. It is spoken by some communities of Angola, because of the Cuban influence from the Cold War. In Côte d'Ivoire and Senegal, the Spanish can be learned as a second foreign language in the public educative system.. In 2008, Cervantes Institutes centers will be opened in Lagos and Johannesburg, the first one in the Sub-Saharan Africa

Oceania

Among the countries and territories in Oceania, Spanish is also spoken in 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.
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 Spanish colonial possessions until late 19th century (see Spanish-American War), but Spanish has since been forgotten. It now only exists as an influence on the local native languages.

Variations

There are important variations among the regions of Spain and throughout Spanish-speaking America. In countries in Hispanophone America it's preferable to use the word castellano to distinguish their version of the language from that of Spain, thus asserting their autonomy and national identity. In Spain the Castilian dialect's pronunciation is commonly regarded as the national standard, although a use of slightly different pronouns called [[Loísmo|]] of this dialect is deprecated. More accurately, for nearly everyone in Spain, "standard Spanish" means "pronouncing everything exactly as it's written", an ideal which doesn't 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's 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 for daily use, (formal or familiar, as the case may be, though non-formal usage can sometimes appear in poetry and rhetorical or literary style). 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 or Seville, and in the Canary Islands) it's replaced with . It is remarkable that the use of for the informal plural "you" in southern Spain doesn't follow the usual rule for pronoun-verb agreement; for example, while the formal form for "you go",, uses the third-person plural form of the verb, in Cádiz or Seville 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're not commonly used, but Spaniards generally don't 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 "vulva". 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.

Writing system

Spanish is written using the Latin alphabet, with the addition of the character ñ (eñe), which represents the phoneme /ɲ/ and is regarded as a letter of its own distinct from n, despite being typographically an n with a tilde. The digraphs ch and ll are considered single letters, with their own names and places in the alphabet, because each represents a single phoneme (/tʃ/ and /ʎ/, respectively). However, the digraph rr ("double r", or simply as opposed to ), which also represents a single phoneme /r/, wasn't 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): ť 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. Nevertheless, the names che and elle are still used colloquially. All words that start with the rr sound are written with only one r and collated under this letter. There are no words that start with the r sound.
   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's 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: for example, 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.
   When u is written between g and a front vowel (e or i), if it should be pronounced, it's written with a diaeresis (ü) to indicate that it isn't silent as it normally would be (for example, cigüeña, "stork", is pronounced /θ̟iˈɰweɲa/, /s̟iˈɰweɲa/; if it were written cigueña, it would be pronounced /θ̟iˈɰeɲa/, /s̟iˈɰeɲa/).
   Interrogative and exclamatory clauses are introduced with inverted question (¿ ) and exclamation marks (¡ ).

Sounds

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.

	Bilabial		Labio- dental		Inter- dental		Dental		Laminal denti-alveolar		Apical alveolar		Post- Alveolar		Alveolo- palatal	Palatal		Velar		Uvular	Glottal
Plosives	p	(b)					t̪	(d̪)								(ɟ)		k	(g)
Affricate													ʧ	(ʤ)	(ʨ)
Fricatives			f	(v)	θ̟*	(ð̟)			s̻	(z̻)	(s̺)	(z̺)	(ʃ)	(ʒ)		(ç)	ʝ	x		(χ)	(h)
Approximants	β̞						ð̞									(j)		ɰ
Nasals	(m̥)	m	(ɱ)		(n̟)		(n̪̥)	(n̪)	(n̻)		n		(n̠̥)	(n̠)	(n̠̥ʲ)	ɲ		(ŋ̥)	(ŋ)	(ɴ)
Laterals					(l̟)		(l̪)		(l̻)		l		(l̠)		(l̠ʲ)	ʎ*
Flaps											ɾ
Trills											r

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:

Initial /f/, when it had evolved into a vacillating /h/, was lost in most words (although this etymological h- is preserved in spelling and in some Andalusian dialects is still aspirated).

The bilabial approximant /β̞/ (which was written u or v) merged with the bilabial oclusive /b/ (written b). There is no difference between the pronunciation of orthographic b and v in contemporary Spanish, excepting specific areas in Spain (particularly the ones influenced by Catalan) and Latin America.

The voiced alveolar fricative /z/ which existed as a separate phoneme in medieval Spanish merged with its voiceless counterpart /s/. The phoneme which resulted from this merger is currently spelled s.

The voiced postalveolar fricative /ʒ/ merged with its voiceless counterpart /ʃ/, which evolved into the modern velar sound /x/ by the 17th century, now written with j, or g before e, i. Nevertheless, in most parts of Argentina and in Uruguay, y and ll have both evolved to /ʒ/ or /ʃ/.

The voiced alveolar affricate /dz/ merged with its voiceless counterpart /ts/, which then developed into the interdental /θ/, now written z, or c before e, i. But in Andalusia, the Canary Islands and the Americas this sound merged with /s/ as well. See Ceceo, for further information. The consonant system of Medieval Spanish has been better preserved in Ladino and in Portuguese, neither of which underwent these shifts.

Lexical stress

Spanish syllables are all pronounced at a more or less constant tempo, so it's sometimes said to be syllable-timed, but in fact it's stress-timed, with different stress patterns resulting in separate meanings for the same spelling, distinguishable by written accents, especially noticeable in verb conjugations. 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." 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!").

Grammar

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 (though not always) 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.

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