Spanish Language

I

Introduction

Spanish Language, member of the Romance group in the Italic subfamily of the Indo-European language family, spoken chiefly in the Iberian peninsula and in Latin America by an estimated 382 million people, including second-language speakers. It is also known as Castilian, after the dialect from which modern Spanish developed. The Spanish language was carried by Spanish colonists to the Canary Islands, the Antilles, the Philippines, southern North America, the greater part of South America, and the coast of Africa. In the Iberian peninsula the Spanish-language area does not coincide exactly with the political boundaries of Spain. Spain contains three non-Spanish-speaking regions: Galicia, in the north-west, where Galician, or Gallego (technically closer to Portuguese than Spanish) is spoken and holds official status; the Basque provinces, in the north, where Basque, a unique agglutinative language, is spoken and holds official status; and Catalonia, along the east coast, where Catalan, also a Romance language, is spoken and holds official status. Catalan is also spoken in the Balearic Islands; in Andorra, where it is the official language; in France, in the Pyrénées-Orientales; and in parts of Italy, South America, Switzerland, and the United States.

II

History

The Vulgar Latin spoken by Roman armies and settlers in ancient Spain formed the basis of the many Spanish dialects that developed in the various regions of the country during the Middle Ages. The dialect of Castile, or Castilian Spanish, gradually became the accepted standard as Castile gained political dominance in the 13th century.

While the majority of Spanish words derive from Latin, many are taken from other sources; for example, pre-Latin languages such as Greek, Basque, and Celtic. The invasion of the Visigoths early in the 5th century ad introduced a few Germanic words. The Muslim conquest three centuries later brought in a large number of Arabic words, many of which are easily detected by the prefixed Arabic article al. Under the influence, beginning in the 11th century, of French ecclesiastics and pilgrims on their way to Santiago de Compostela in north-western Spain, the Spanish vocabulary was appreciably augmented by words and phrases from French. During the 15th and 16th centuries an infusion of elements from the Italian occurred because of Aragonese domination in Italy and the great vogue of Italian poetry in Spain. Relations between Spain and its colonies and possessions have led to the introduction of terms from Native American languages and other sources, and scholarly activities have constantly increased the stock of borrowed words.

III

Grammar

In its grammatical structure Spanish is generally in conformity with French, Italian, Portuguese, and the other Romance languages. A pronounced peculiarity of Spanish grammar, however, is the use of the preposition a (normally meaning “to”) as an untranslatable particle before the direct object of a verb if that object is a person; for example, veo a mi amigo (“I see [particle] my friend”). The four conjugations of Latin have been reduced in Spanish to three; furthermore, regular verbs of the Spanish second and third conjugations differ in only four forms, namely, the present infinitive, the first and second persons plural of the present indicative mood, and the second person plural of the imperative mood.

The subjunctive mood is much more widely used in Spanish than in most modern languages, having, besides the customary present and imperfect tenses, a second imperfect form derived from the Latin pluperfect indicative. Auxiliaries are used to form the compound tenses, as in the other Romance languages; for the perfect tenses, the auxiliary in Spanish is always a form of haber (“to have”), as in se ha lisonjeado, “he has flattered himself” (in French and Italian, in contrast, “to be” is used for the perfect of certain verbs). Spanish far exceeds most of the other Romance languages in its idiomatic use of reflexive verbs with special meanings. As in the other Romance tongues, the Spanish future and conditional indicative are really compounds formed by adding to the entire infinitive (used as a stem) the present and imperfect indicative endings, respectively, of haber. The Spanish neuter gender survives in a few instances: in the singular of the definite article lo, in the demonstrative words esto, eso, and aquello, and in the third-person objective pronoun lo. These neuter forms occur only in indefinite and general constructions (no lo hizo, “he didn't do it”) and in constructions in which the neuter article, accompanied by an adjective or adverb, forms abstract expressions; thus, lo bueno, “the good”, means “goodness”.

IV

Spanish Around the World

Standard Spanish is spoken in 43 countries other than Spain, and in many of those it is an official language. Other Spanish languages that also arose from Castilian are Ladino, or Judaeo-Spanish, spoken primarily in Israel; Caló, a cryptic, Romany version of Spanish that is spoken by minorities in Spain, Brazil, France, and Portugal; and Loreto-Ucayali Spanish, or Jungle Spanish, used near the Loreto and Ucayali rivers in Peru. There are two Spanish-based creole languages: Chavanaco, with much Spanish vocabulary (but not grammar), spoken in the Philippines; and Palenquero, used in Colombia and not mutually intelligible with Spanish.

Selected statistical data from Ethnologue: Languages of the World, SIL International.