Spanish language

• 1. Introduction

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  Spanish, called español or castellano, is spoken today by about 519 million people as a native language and roughly 636 million in total. It is the official language of 20 countries and one of the six official languages of the United Nations. Yet it began as something far smaller, a regional way of speaking that grew out of the Latin carried into Iberia by Roman soldiers during the Second Punic War, starting in 210 BC. How did the speech of one kingdom in north-central Spain become the world's most widely spoken Romance language, second among native tongues only to Mandarin Chinese? Why do its own speakers argue over what to call it? And what does a queen, a sea voyage, and a single silent letter have to do with the answer? The country with the most native speakers is not Spain. It is Mexico.

• 2. Two Names, One Tongue

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  Castellano, the word, ties the language to Castile, a name usually traced to castillo, meaning castle. The Romance vernacular of the Kingdom of Castile became known generically as Romance, then as Lengua vulgar, and finally simply as castellano. The Royal Spanish Academy offers a different origin for español. It derives the term from the Occitan word espaignol, which in turn comes from the Vulgar Latin hispaniolus, meaning of Hispania, the Roman name for the whole Iberian Peninsula.

  The Spanish Constitution of 1978 chose castellano to name the official language of the whole state. Its Article III calls Castilian the official Spanish language of the State, while granting that the other Spanish languages shall also be official in their respective Autonomous Communities. Those other languages include Galician, Basque, Asturian, Catalan or Valencian, Aragonese, and Occitan.

  The Royal Spanish Academy now prefers español in its publications, but this was not always so. From 1713 to 1923 it called the language castellano. Its own guide, the Diccionario panhispánico de dudas, settles the dispute plainly. It treats español and castellano as synonymous and equally valid. The philologist Ramón Menéndez Pidal proposed yet another path for español, suggesting the classical hispanus took the suffix -one, just as bretón and sajón did.

• 3. From Burgos To The New World

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  The first documents showing traces of the precursor of modern Spanish date from the 9th century, in mid-northern Iberia. According to Ramón Menéndez Pidal, local sociolects of Vulgar Latin evolved into Spanish in the north, in an area centered on the city of Burgos. That dialect was carried south to Toledo, where the written standard was first developed in the 13th century. The standard was refined in Toledo through the 16th century and in Madrid from the 1570s.

  The Reconquista pushed this dialect into southern Spain, and along the way it absorbed Arabic from Al-Andalus. Some 4,000 Arabic-derived words remain, about 8% of the language today, much of it reaching Spanish indirectly through the Romance Mozarabic dialects. Other early influences came from neighboring tongues such as Navarro-Aragonese, Leonese, Portuguese, Galician, and later French and Italian.

  In 1492, in Salamanca, Elio Antonio de Nebrija wrote the Gramática de la lengua castellana, the first grammar written for a modern European language. A popular anecdote tells that when Nebrija presented it to Queen Isabella I, she asked what use such a work could have. He answered that language is the instrument of empire. In his introduction, dated the 18th of August 1492, he wrote that language was always the companion of empire.

  From the 16th century onward the language sailed to the Americas and the Spanish East Indies through colonization. Miguel de Cervantes, author of Don Quixote, became so famous a reference that Spanish is often called la lengua de Cervantes, the language of Cervantes.

• 4. The Shapes Of Sound

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  Latin vīta became Spanish vida, a clean example of lenition, the softening of consonants between vowels that marks the Western Romance languages. Spanish also diphthongized the stressed short e and o of Latin in both open and closed syllables, something neither Catalan nor Portuguese did. Latin double consonants were palatalized too, so annum became año and anellum became anillo.

  A single silent letter tells one of the strangest stories. Some scholars attribute to a Basque substratum the mutation of Latin initial f into h whenever a vowel followed that did not diphthongize. The h survives in spelling but is now silent in most varieties, though some Andalusian and Caribbean dialects still aspirate it. Borrowing left behind doublets such as Fernando and Hernando, both meaning Ferdinand, and fierro and hierro, both meaning iron.

  In the 15th and 16th centuries the sibilant consonants shifted dramatically, a change Spanish calls the reajuste de las sibilantes. It produced the velar pronunciation of one letter and, across much of Spain, the interdental th-sound for another. These changes left modern Spanish with five vowel phonemes and, depending on dialect, 17 to 19 consonant phonemes.

• 5. Many Yous

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  Virtually every dialect of Spanish splits the second-person singular into a formal usted and a familiar form that is either tú or vos. The use of vos and its verb forms is called voseo, and where it appears the forms often derive from the old plural vosotros by dropping a glide, so vosotros pensáis becomes vos pensás. Areas of generalized voseo include Argentina, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Costa Rica, Paraguay, and Uruguay, along with several Colombian departments.

  Ustedes carries both formal and informal weight across all of Hispanic America, the Canary Islands, and parts of Andalusia, always agreeing with a third-person plural verb. Most of Spain keeps the split between ustedes and vosotros. In Central America, especially Honduras, usted can pass between members of a romantic couple as a sign of respect.

  The object pronouns divide speakers too. Most use lo and la for direct objects and le for indirect ones, a pattern called etymological because it continues the Latin accusative and dative. Some dialects, more common in Spain, layer on rules of animacy or count nouns, producing the variations known as leísmo, loísmo, and laísmo.

• 6. A Borrowed Vocabulary

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  About 75% of modern Spanish vocabulary comes from Latin, including Latin borrowings from Ancient Greek. Classical Greek words fill the terminologies of art, science, politics, and nature. Arabic contributed roughly 8% of the lexicon during the Al-Andalus era, and traces of Basque, Iberian, Celtiberian, and Visigothic linger as well.

  Each century added its own layer. In the 18th century, French words for fashion, cooking, and bureaucracy entered the lexicon. The 19th century brought loanwords from English and German, plus Italian terms tied to music, opera, and cooking. In the 20th century, English pressed hard in technology, computing, science, and sports.

  Geography splits the words too. Hispanic America leans toward Anglicisms because of closer contact with the United States, so a computer mouse is mouse there but ratón in Spain. Spain answers with Gallicisms, using ordenador where American Spanish says computador or computadora. The same divide turns Spanish mantequilla, aguacate, and albaricoque into manteca, palta, and damasco across much of the Southern Cone.

• 7. A Language Off The Map

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  Equatorial Guinea is the only Spanish-speaking country located entirely in Africa, where the Instituto Cervantes estimates that 87.7% of the population is fluent. Spanish reached it during the colonial period and now sits in the constitution as an official language alongside French and Portuguese. Smaller communities survive in Angola and South Sudan, shaped by Cuban influence during the Cold War and by South Sudanese who relocated to Cuba.

  In Asia, Spanish was the official language of the Philippines from the start of Spanish administration in 1565 until a constitutional change in 1973, then briefly removed and reimplemented under Ferdinand Marcos two months later. By the end of Spanish rule in 1898 only about 10% of the population knew Spanish. Today proficient speakers number about 400,000, under 0.5% of the population, yet over 7,000 students studied the language in public schools in the 2021 to 2022 school year alone. A Spanish-based creole called Chavacano, not mutually intelligible with Spanish, was estimated at 1.2 million speakers in 1996.

  The language carries its history into unexpected places. Spanish is the official and most spoken language on Easter Island, geographically part of Polynesia and politically part of Chile, though the island's traditional language is Rapa Nui. And in the United States, after the Guadalupe Hidalgo Treaty of 1848, hundreds of thousands of Spanish speakers became a minoritized community. By the 2020 census, 41.8 million people aged five or older spoke Spanish at home, about 13% of the population.

• 8. Keepers Of The Standard

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  The Royal Spanish Academy, founded in 1713, shapes the language through dictionaries, grammars, and style guides. It does not work alone. The Association of Spanish Language Academies, created in Mexico in 1951, unites the academies of 23 countries, ordered by foundation date from Spain in 1713 to Equatorial Guinea in 2016.

  The Instituto Cervantes, a nonprofit created by the Spanish government in 1991, carries the language outward through 88 centers in 45 countries. Its 2015 report El español, una lengua viva estimated 559 million Spanish speakers worldwide, and its 2018 report counted 577 million. One source it cites, the U.S. Census Bureau, projects 138 million Spanish speakers in the United States by 2050, which would make it the biggest Spanish-speaking nation on earth.

  One sentence shows where all this standardizing leads. Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights reads in Spanish: Todos los seres humanos nacen libres e iguales en dignidad y derechos. From the Latin of Roman soldiers to a line about human dignity read in 20 countries, the instrument Nebrija described to a queen now belongs to more than half a billion people.