10 facts about the Spanish language
1. With 358 (1999) million native speakers, Spanish ranks as the world's No. 2 language in terms of how many people speak it as their first language. A total of 417 million (1999) people speak Spanish worldwide.
Mexico contains the largest population of Spanish speakers. Spanish is one of the six official languages of the United Nations.
2. Spanish has at least 3 million native speakers each in 44 countries, making it the fourth mostly geographically widely spoken language.
3. Spanish is part of the Indo-European family of languages. Spanish can be classified further as a Romance language.
4. Although there is no clear boundary defining when the Latin of what is now the north-central area of Spain became Spanish, it is safe to say that the language of the Castile region became a distinct language in part because of efforts by King Alfonso in the 13th century to standardize the language for official use. By the time Columbus came to the Western Hemisphere in 1492, Spanish had reached the point where the language as spoken and written would be easily understandable today.
5. To the people who speak it, Spanish is sometimes called español and sometimes castellano (the Spanish equivalent of Castilian).
6. Spanish is one of the world's most phonetic languages. If you know how a word is spelled, you can almost always know how it is pronounced.
7. The Royal Spanish Academy (Real Academia Española, created 1713 by Philip V, and within 200 years corresponding bodies had been set up in most South American Spanish countries) is widely considered the arbiter of what is considered standard Spanish. It produces authoritative dictionaries and grammar guides. Although its decisions do not have the force of law, they are widely followed in both Spain and Latin America.
8. Although Spanish originated on the Iberian Peninsula as a descendant of Latin, today it is has far more speakers in Latin America, having been brought to the New World by Spanish colonialization. Although there are minor differences in vocabulary, grammar and pronunciation between the Spanish of Spain and the Spanish of Latin America, the differences are not so great as to prevent easy communication.
9. After Latin, the language that has had the biggest influence on Spanish is Arabic. Today, the foreign language exerting the most influence is English.
10. Spanish and English share much of their vocabulary through cognates, as both languages derive many of their words from Latin and Arabic.
Spain - National or official languages
Spanish, regional languages: Aragonese, Asturian, Basque, Galician, Aranese Gascon, Catalan. Literacy rate: 93%–97%. Immigrant languages: Fa D’ambu (600), Judeo-Tunisian Arabic, Kabuverdianu (10,000), Portuguese, Tarifit, Vlax Romani (1,000), Western Farsi (25,000). Also includes Arabic (200,000), Chinese (20,000), and languages of Latin America (150,000). Information mainly from P. Blanchet 1986; B. Comrie 1987; J. Fishman 1991; M. Stephens 1976. Blind population: 30,000 (1982 WCE). Deaf population: 120,000 to 2,383,940. Deaf institutions: 129. The number of individual languages listed for Spain is 14. Of those, all are living languages.
Dialect
Andalusian (Andalú, Andaluz, Andalusí), Aragonese, Murcian, Navarrese, Castilian, Canary Islands Spanish (Isleño), American Spanish (Chicano), Silbo Gomero. Leonese has similarities to Asturian, and may be extinct. Lexical similarity: 89% with Portuguese, 85% with Catalan [cat], 82% with Italian, 76% with Sardinian [src], 75% with French, 74% with Ladin [lld], 71% with Romanian [ron].
Classification: Indo-European, Italic, Romance, Italo-Western, Western, Gallo-Iberian, Ibero-Romance, West Iberian, Castilian.
Lewis, M. Paul (ed.), 2009. Ethnologue: Languages of the World, Sixteenth edition. Dallas, Tex.: SIL International. Online version: http://www.ethnologue.com/.
Who's learning Spanish these days?Residents of the United States, are studying Spanish in record numbers. Spanish is becoming of greater importance in Europe too, where it often the foreign language of choice after English. It is an official language on four continents and is of historical importance elsewhere.
Swedish school authorities maintain that there is a growing interest among some school youngsters in this Nordic nation in learning extra foreign languages – beyond the obligatory English - - and that Spanish remains at the top of the list.
Although a smaller number choose German and French, more and more are selecting Chinese – when it’s offered at their school.
But some teachers frown that many students ignore all other languages – confident that English is sufficient – and others give up after only a few years of struggling with that foreign vocabulary.
