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Spanish (español) or Castilian (castellano) is a Romance language of the Indo-European language family that evolved from the Vulgar Latin spoken on the Iberian Peninsula of Europe. Today, it is a world language with 483 million native speakers, mainly in the Americas and Spain, and about 558 million speakers total, including second-language speakers. Spanish is the official language of 20 countries, as well as one of the six official languages of the United Nations. Spanish is the world's second-most spoken native language after Mandarin Chinese; the world's fourth-most spoken language overall after English language, Mandarin Chinese, and Hindustani (Hindi-Urdu); and the world's most widely spoken Romance language. The country with the largest population of native speakers is Mexico.
Spanish is part of the Ibero-Romance language group, in which the language is also known as Castilian (castellano). The group evolved from several dialects of Vulgar Latin in Iberia after the collapse of the Western Roman Empire in the 5th century. The oldest Latin texts with traces of Spanish come from mid-northern Iberia in the 9th century, and the first systematic written use of the language happened in Toledo, a prominent city of the Kingdom of Castile, in the 13th century. Spanish colonialism in the early modern period spurred the introduction of the language to overseas locations, most notably to the Americas.
As a Romance language, Spanish is a descendant of Latin. Around 75% of modern Spanish vocabulary is Latin in origin, including Latin borrowings from Ancient Greek.9789685430012, Ediciones Umbral. . ISBN 9789685430012 Alongside English and French language, it is also one of the most taught foreign languages throughout the world. Spanish in the World , Language Magazine, 18 November 2019. Spanish is well represented in the humanities and . Spanish is also the third most used language on the internet by number of users after English and Chinese and the second most used language by number of websites after English.
Spanish is used as an official language by many international organizations, including the United Nations, European Union, Organization of American States, Union of South American Nations, Community of Latin American and Caribbean States, African Union, and others.
The Spanish Constitution of 1978 uses the term castellano to define the official language of the whole of Spain, in contrast to las demás lenguas españolas (). Article III reads as follows:
The Royal Spanish Academy (Real Academia Española), on the other hand, currently uses the term español in its publications. However, from 1713 to 1923, it called the language castellano.
The Diccionario panhispánico de dudas (a language guide published by the Royal Spanish Academy) states that, although the Royal Spanish Academy prefers to use the term español in its publications when referring to the Spanish language, both terms—español and castellano—are regarded as synonymous and equally valid.Diccionario panhispánico de dudas, 2005, p. 271–272.
In the Middle Ages, the language spoken in Castile was generically referred to as Romance and later also as Lengua vulgar. Later in the period, it gained geographical specification as Romance castellano (romanz castellano, romanz de Castiella), lenguaje de Castiella, and ultimately simply as castellano (noun).
Different etymologies have been suggested for the term español (Spanish). According to the Royal Spanish Academy, español derives from the Occitan language word espaignol and that, in turn, derives from the Vulgar Latin *hispaniolus ('of Hispania'). Hispania was the Roman name for the entire Iberian Peninsula.
There are other hypotheses apart from the one suggested by the Royal Spanish Academy. Spanish philologist Ramón Menéndez Pidal suggested that the classic hispanus or hispanicus took the suffix -one from Vulgar Latin, as happened with other words such as bretón (Breton) or sajón (Saxon).
The first documents to show traces of what is today regarded as the precursor of modern Spanish are from the 9th century. Throughout the Middle Ages and into the modern era, the most important Language contact on the Spanish lexicon came from neighboring Romance languages—Andalusi Romance (Andalusi Romance), Navarro-Aragonese, Leonese language, Catalan language, Portuguese, Galician, Occitan language, and later, French language and Italian language. Spanish also Loanword a considerable number of words from Andalusi Arabic, and a few from Basque language. In addition, many more words were borrowed from Latin through the influence of written language and the liturgical language of the Church. The loanwords were taken from both Classical Latin and Renaissance Latin, the form of Latin in use at that time.
According to the theories of Ramón Menéndez Pidal, local of Vulgar Latin evolved into Spanish, in the north of Iberia, in an area centered in the city of Burgos, and this dialect was later brought to the city of Toledo, where the written standard of Spanish was first developed, in the 13th century. In this formative stage, Spanish developed a strongly differing variant from its close cousin, Leonese language, and, according to some authors, was distinguished by a heavy Basque influence (see Iberian Romance languages). This distinctive dialect spread to southern Spain with the advance of the Reconquista, and meanwhile gathered a sizable lexical influence from the Arabic of Al-Andalus, much of it indirectly, through the Romance Andalusi Romance (some 4,000 Arabic-derived words, make up around 8% of the language today). The written standard for this new language was developed in the cities of Toledo, in the 13th to 16th centuries, and Madrid, from the 1570s.
The development of the Spanish sound system from that of Vulgar Latin exhibits most of the changes that are typical of Western Romance languages, including lenition of intervocalic consonants (thus Latin vīta > Spanish vida). The Vowel breaking of Latin stressed short e and o—which occurred in Syllable in French and Italian, but not at all in Catalan or Portuguese—is found in both open and closed syllables in Spanish, as shown in the following table:
| 'stone' |
| 'land' |
| 'dies (v.)' |
| 'death' |
The consonant written u or v in Latin and pronounced in Classical Latin had probably "Fortition" to a bilabial fricative in Vulgar Latin. In early Spanish (but not in Catalan or Portuguese) it merged with the consonant written b (a bilabial with plosive and fricative allophones). In modern Spanish, there is betacism between the pronunciation of orthographic b and v.
Typical of Spanish (as also of neighboring Gascon language extending as far north as the Gironde estuary, and found in a small area of Calabria), attributed by some scholars to a Basque substratum was the mutation of Latin initial f into h- whenever it was followed by a vowel that did not diphthongize. The h-, still preserved in spelling, is now silent in most varieties of the language, although in some Andalusian and Caribbean dialects, it is still aspirated in some words. Because of borrowings from Latin and neighboring Romance languages, there are many f-/h- doublets in modern Spanish: Fernando and Hernando (both Spanish for "Ferdinand"), ferrero and herrero (both Spanish for "smith"), fierro and hierro (both Spanish for "iron"), and fondo and hondo (both words pertaining to depth in Spanish, though fondo means "bottom", while hondo means "deep"); additionally, hacer ("to make") is cognate to the root word of satisfacer ("to satisfy"), and hecho ("made") is similarly cognate to the root word of satisfecho ("satisfied").
Compare the examples in the following table:
| 'son' |
| 'to do' |
| 'fever' |
| 'fire' |
| 'key' | |
| 'flame' | |
| 'plenty, full' | |
| 'eight' | |
| très, beaucoup, moult | 'much, very, many' |
In the 15th and 16th centuries, Spanish underwent a dramatic change in the pronunciation of its sibilant consonants, known in Spanish as the reajuste de las sibilantes]], which resulted in the distinctive Velar consonant pronunciation of the letter and—in a large part of Spain—the characteristic interdental ("th-sound") for the letter (and for before or ). See History of Spanish (Modern development of the Old Spanish sibilants) for details.
The Gramática de la lengua castellana, written in Salamanca in 1492 by Elio Antonio de Nebrija, was the first grammar written for a modern European language. According to a popular anecdote, when Nebrija presented it to Queen Isabella I, she asked him what was the use of such a work, and he answered that language is the instrument of empire. In his introduction to the grammar, dated 18 August 1492, Nebrija wrote that "... language was always the companion of empire."
From the 16th century onwards, the language was taken to the Spanish-discovered Americas and the Spanish East Indies via Spanish colonization of America. Miguel de Cervantes, author of Don Quixote, is such a well-known reference in the world that Spanish is often called la lengua de Cervantes ("the language of Cervantes").
In the 20th century, Spanish was introduced to Equatorial Guinea and the Western Sahara, and to areas of the United States that had not been part of the Spanish Empire, such as Spanish Harlem in New York City. For details on borrowed words and other external influences upon Spanish, see Influences on the Spanish language.
]]
Spanish is the primary language in 20 countries worldwide. As of 2023, it is estimated that about 486 million people speak Spanish as a First language, making it the second most spoken language by number of native speakers. Estimate. Corrected as Equatorial Guinea is mistakenly included (no native speakers there) An additional 75 million speak Spanish as a second or foreign language, making it the fourth most spoken language in the world overall after English, Mandarin Chinese, and Hindi with a total number of 538 million speakers. Spanish is also the third most used language on the Internet, after English and Chinese.
]]
Spanish is the official language of Spain. Upon the emergence of the Castilian Crown as the dominant power in the Iberian Peninsula by the end of the Middle Ages, the Romance vernacular associated with this polity became increasingly used in instances of prestige and influence, and the distinction between "Castilian" and "Spanish" started to become blurred. Hard policies imposing the language's hegemony in an intensely centralising Spanish state were established from the 18th century onward.
Other European territories in which it is also widely spoken include Gibraltar and Andorra.
Spanish is also spoken by immigrant communities in other European countries, such as the United Kingdom, France, Italy, and Germany. Spanish is an official language of the European Union.
According to the 2020 census, over 60 million people of the U.S. population were of Hispanic or by origin. In turn, 41.8 million people in the United States aged five or older speak Spanish at home, or about 13% of the population. Spanish predominates in the unincorporated territory of Puerto Rico, where it is also an official language along with English.
Spanish is by far the most common second language in the country, with over 50 million total speakers if non-native or second-language speakers are included. (in Spanish) While English is the de facto national language of the country, Spanish is often used in public services and notices at the federal and state levels. Spanish is also used in administration in the state of New Mexico. The language has a strong influence in major metropolitan areas such as those of Los Angeles, Miami, San Antonio, New York, San Francisco, Dallas, Greater Tucson and Phoenix of the Arizona Sun Corridor, as well as more recently, Chicago, Las Vegas, Greater Boston, Greater Denver, Greater Houston, Indianapolis, Philadelphia, Cleveland, Salt Lake City, Greater Atlanta, Nashville, Greater Orlando, Greater Tampa, Greater Raleigh and Baltimore-Washington, D.C. due to 20th- and 21st-century immigration.
Due to its proximity to Spanish-speaking countries and small existing native Spanish speaking minority, Trinidad and Tobago has implemented Spanish language teaching into its education system. The Trinidadian and Tobagonian government launched the Spanish as a First Foreign Language (SAFFL) initiative in March 2005.
Spanish has historically had a significant presence on the Dutch Caribbean islands of Aruba, Bonaire and Curaçao (ABC Islands) throughout the centuries and in present times. The majority of the populations of each island (especially Aruba) speaking Spanish at varying although often high degrees of fluency. The local language Papiamento (Papiamento on Aruba) is heavily influenced by Venezuelan Spanish.
In addition to sharing most of its borders with Spanish-speaking countries, the creation of Mercosur in the early 1990s induced a favorable situation for the promotion of Spanish language teaching in Brazil. In 2005, the National Congress of Brazil approved a bill, signed into law by the President, making it mandatory for to offer Spanish as an alternative foreign language course in both public and private secondary schools in Brazil. In September 2016 this law was revoked by Michel Temer after the impeachment of Dilma Rousseff. In many border towns and villages along Paraguay and Uruguay, a mixed language known as Portuñol is spoken.
Spanish is spoken by very small communities in Angola due to Cuban influence from the Cold War and in South Sudan among South Sudanese natives that relocated to Cuba during the Sudanese wars and returned for their country's independence.
While far from its heyday during the Spanish protectorate in Morocco, the Spanish language has some presence in northern Morocco, stemming for example from the availability of certain Spanish-language media. According to a 2012 survey by Morocco's Royal Institute for Strategic Studies (IRES), penetration of Spanish in Morocco reaches 4.6% of the population. Many northern Moroccans have rudimentary knowledge of Spanish, with Spanish being particularly significant in areas adjacent to Ceuta and Melilla. Spanish also has a presence in the education system of the country (through either selected education centers implementing Spain's education system, primarily located in the North, or the availability of Spanish as foreign language subject in secondary education).
In Western Sahara, formerly Spanish Sahara, a primarily Hassaniya Arabic-speaking territory, Spanish was officially spoken as the language of the colonial administration during the late 19th and 20th centuries. Today, Spanish is present in the partially-recognized Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic as its secondary official language, and in the Sahrawi refugee camps in Tindouf (Algeria), where the Spanish language is still taught as a second language, largely by Cuban educators.
Spanish is also an official language of the African Union.
Spanish continued to be official and used in Philippine literature and press during the early years of American administration after the Spanish–American War but was eventually replaced by English as the primary language of administration and education by the 1920s. Nevertheless, despite a significant decrease in influence and speakers, Spanish remained an official language of the Philippines upon independence in 1946, alongside English and Filipino, a standardized version of Tagalog language.
Spanish was briefly removed from official status in 1973 but reimplemented under the administration of Ferdinand Marcos two months later. It remained an official language until the ratification of the present constitution in 1987, in which it was re-designated as a voluntary and optional auxiliary language.Article XIV, Sec 7: "For purposes of communication and instruction, the official languages of the Philippines are Filipino and, until otherwise provided by law, English. The regional languages are the auxiliary official languages in the regions and shall serve as auxiliary media of instruction therein. Spanish and Arabic shall be promoted on a voluntary and optional basis." Additionally, the constitution, in its Article XIV, stipulates that the government shall provide the people of the Philippines with a Spanish-language translation of the country's constitution.Article XIV, Sec 8: "This Constitution shall be promulgated in Filipino and English and shall be translated into major regional languages, Arabic, and Spanish." In recent years changing attitudes among non-Spanish speaking Filipinos have helped spur a revival of the language, and starting in 2009 Spanish was reintroduced as part of the basic education curriculum in a number of public high schools, becoming the largest foreign language program offered by the public school system, with over 7,000 students studying the language in the 2021–2022 school year alone. The local business process outsourcing industry has also helped boost the language's economic prospects. Today, while the actual number of proficient Spanish speakers is around 400,000, or under 0.5% of the population, a new generation of Spanish speakers in the Philippines has likewise emerged, though speaker estimates vary widely.
Aside from standard Spanish, a Spanish-based creole language called Chavacano developed in the southern Philippines. However, it is not mutually intelligible with Spanish.Spanish creole: The number of Chavacano-speakers was estimated at 1.2 million in 1996. The local languages of the Philippines also retain significant Spanish influence, with many words derived from Mexican Spanish, owing to the administration of the islands by Spain through New Spain until 1821, until direct governance from Madrid afterwards to 1898.
As a legacy of comprising the former Spanish East Indies, Spanish loan words are present in the local languages of Guam, Northern Mariana Islands, Palau, Marshall Islands and Micronesia.
In addition, in Australia and New Zealand, there are native Spanish communities, resulting from emigration from Spanish-speaking countries (mainly from the Southern Cone).
Verbs express T–V distinction by using different persons for formal and informal addresses. (For a detailed overview of verbs, see Spanish verbs and Spanish irregular verbs.)
Spanish syntax is considered right-branching, meaning that subordinate or modifying constituents tend to be placed after head words. The language uses prepositions (rather than postpositions or inflection of nouns for Grammatical case), and usually—though not always—places after , as do most other Romance languages.
Spanish is classified as a subject–verb–object language; however, as in most Romance languages, constituent order is highly variable and governed mainly by topicalization and focus. It is a "pro-drop", or "null-subject" language—that is, it allows the deletion of subject pronouns when they are Pragmatics unnecessary. Spanish is described as a "Verb framing" language, meaning that the direction of motion is expressed in the verb while the mode of locomotion is expressed adverbially (e.g. subir corriendo or salir volando; the respective English equivalents of these examples—'to run up' and 'to fly out'—show that English is, by contrast, "satellite-framed", with mode of locomotion expressed in the verb and direction in an adverbial modifier).
The Spanish consonant system is characterized by (1) three nasal stop phonemes, and one or two (depending on the dialect) lateral phoneme(s), which in syllable-final position Archiphonemic and are subject to assimilation to a following consonant; (2) three Voicelessness Plosive and the affricate ; (3) three or four (depending on the dialect) Voicelessness fricatives; (4) a set of voiced —, , , and sometimes —which alternate between approximant and plosive allophones depending on the environment; and (5) a phonemic distinction between the "Flap consonant" and "Trill consonant" r-sounds (single and double in orthography).
In the following table of consonant phonemes, is marked with an asterisk (*) to indicate that it is preserved only in some dialects. In most dialects it has been merged with in the merger called yeísmo. Similarly, is also marked with an asterisk to indicate that most dialects do not distinguish it from (see seseo), although this is not a true merger but an outcome of different evolution of sibilants in southern Spain.
The phoneme is in parentheses () to indicate that it appears only in loanwords. Each of the voiced obstruent phonemes , , , and appears to the right of a pair of voiceless phonemes, to indicate that, while the voiceless phonemes maintain a phonemic contrast between plosive (or affricate) and fricative, the voiced ones alternate Allophone (i.e. without phonemic contrast) between plosive and approximant pronunciations.
| + Consonant phonemes |
Spanish intonation varies significantly according to dialect but generally conforms to a pattern of falling tone for declarative sentences and wh-questions (who, what, why, etc.) and rising tone for yes/no questions. There are no syntactic markers to distinguish between questions and statements and thus, the recognition of declarative or interrogative depends entirely on intonation.
Stress most often occurs on any of the last three syllables of a word, with some rare exceptions at the fourth-to-last or earlier syllables. Stress tends to occur as follows:
In addition to the many exceptions to these tendencies, there are numerous that contrast solely on stress such as sábana ('sheet') and sabana ('savannah'); límite ('boundary'), limite ('he/she limits') and limité ('I limited'); líquido ('liquid'), liquido ('I sell off') and liquidó ('he/she sold off').
The orthographic system unambiguously reflects where the stress occurs: in the absence of an accent mark, the stress falls on the last syllable unless the last letter is , , or a vowel, in which cases the stress falls on the next-to-last (penultimate) syllable. Exceptions to those rules are indicated by an acute accent mark over the vowel of the stressed syllable. (See Spanish orthography.)
The national variety with the most speakers is Mexican Spanish. It is spoken by more than twenty percent of the world's Spanish speakers (more than 112 million of the total of more than 500 million, according to the table above). One of its main features is the vowel reduction or loss of , mainly when they are in contact with the sound /s/.Eleanor Greet Cotton, John M. Sharp (1988) Spanish in the Americas, Volume 2, pp. 154–155,
In Spain, northern dialects are popularly thought of as closer to the standard, although positive attitudes toward southern dialects have increased significantly in the last 50 years. The speech from the educated classes of Madrid is the standard variety for use on radio and television in Spain and it is indicated by many as the one that has most influenced the written standard for Spanish.: "whatever might be claimed by other centres, such as Valladolid, it was educated varieties of Madrid Spanish that were mostly regularly reflected in the written standard." Central (European) Spanish speech patterns have been noted to be in the process of merging with more innovative southern varieties (including Eastern Andalusian and Murcian), as an emerging interdialectal levelled koine buffered between the Madrid's traditional national standard and the Seville speech trends.
In voseo, vos is the subject form (vos decís, "you say") and the form for the object of a preposition (voy con vos, "I am going with you"), while the direct and indirect object forms, and the possessives, are the same as those associated with tú: Vos sabés que tus amigos te respetan ("You know your friends respect you").
The verb forms of the general voseo are the same as those used with tú except in the present tense (indicative and imperative mood) verbs. The forms for vos generally can be derived from those of vosotros (the traditional second-person familiar plural) by deleting the semivowel , or , where it appears in the ending: vosotros pensá is > vos pensás; vosotros volvé is > vos volvés, pensa d! (vosotros) > pensá! (vos), volve d! (vosotros) > volvé! (vos).
| + General voseo (River Plate Spanish) ! colspan="5" style="text-align:center;" | Indicative ! colspan="2" style="text-align:center;" | Subjunctive ! rowspan="2" style="text-align:center;" | Imperative | ||||
| pensás | pensaste | pensabas | pensarás | pensarías | pienses | pensaras pensases | pensá |
| volvés | volviste | volvías | volverás | volverías | vuelvas | volvieras volvieses | volvé |
| dormís | dormiste | dormías | dormirás | dormirías | duermas | durmieras durmieses | dormí |
| The forms in bold coincide with standard tú-conjugation. | |||||||
In Central American voseo, the tú and vos forms differ in the present subjunctive as well:
| + Central American voseo ! colspan="5" style="text-align:center;" | Indicative ! colspan="2" style="text-align:center;" | Subjunctive ! rowspan="2" style="text-align:center;" | Imperative | ||||
| pensás | pensaste | pensabas | pensarás | pensarías | pensés | pensaras pensases | pensá |
| volvés | volviste | volvías | volverás | volverías | volvás | volvieras volvieses | volvé |
| dormís | dormiste | dormías | dormirás | dormirías | durmás | durmieras durmieses | dormí |
| The forms in bold coincide with standard tú-conjugation. | |||||||
| + Chilean voseo ! colspan="5" style="text-align:center;" | Indicative ! colspan="2" style="text-align:center;" | Subjunctive ! rowspan="2" style="text-align:center;" | Imperative | ||||
| pensái(s) | pensaste | pensabais | pensarí(s) pensaráis | pensaríai(s) | pensí(s) | pensarai(s) pensases | piensa |
| volví(s) | volviste | volvíai(s) | volverí(s) volveráis | volveríai(s) | volvái(s) | volvierai(s) volvieses | vuelve |
| dormís | dormiste | dormíais | dormirís dormiráis | dormiríais | durmáis | durmierais durmieses | duerme |
| The forms in bold coincide with standard tú-conjugation. | |||||||
The use of the pronoun vos with the verb forms of tú (vos piensas) is called "pronominal voseo". Conversely, the use of the verb forms of vos with the pronoun tú (tú pensás or tú pensái) is called "verbal voseo". In Chile, for example, verbal voseo is much more common than the actual use of the pronoun vos, which is usually reserved for highly informal situations.
Tuteo as a cultured form alternates with voseo as a popular or rural form in Bolivia, in the north and south of Peru, in Andean Ecuador, in small zones of the Venezuelan Andes (and most notably in the Venezuelan state of Zulia), and in a large part of Colombia. Some researchers maintain that voseo can be heard in some parts of eastern Cuba, and others assert that it is absent from the island.Katia Salamanca de Abreu, review of Humberto López Morales, Estudios sobre el español de Cuba (New York: Editorial Las Américas, 1970), in Thesaurus, 28 (1973), 138–146.
Tuteo exists as the second-person usage with an intermediate degree of formality alongside the more familiar voseo in Chile, in the Venezuelan state of Zulia, on the Caribbean coast of Colombia, in the Azuero Peninsula in Panama, in the Mexican state of Chiapas, and in parts of Guatemala.
Areas of generalized voseo include Argentina, Nicaragua, eastern Bolivia, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Costa Rica, Paraguay, Uruguay and the Colombian departments of Antioquia, Caldas, Risaralda, Quindio and Valle del Cauca.
In Central America, especially in Honduras, usted is often used as a formal pronoun to convey respect between the members of a romantic couple. Usted is also used that way between parents and children in the Andean regions of Ecuador, Colombia and Venezuela.
A number of dialects (more common in Spain than in the Americas) use additional rules for the pronouns, such as animacy, or count noun vs. mass noun, rather than just direct vs. indirect object. The ways of using the pronouns in such varieties are called "leísmo", "loísmo", or "laísmo", according to which respective pronoun, le, lo, or la, covers more than just the etymological usage (le as a direct object, or lo or la as an indirect object).
Most of the Spanish lexicon is made up of heritage lexicon. Heritage or directly inherited words are those whose presence in the spoken language has been continued since before the differentiation of the Romance languages. Heritage words are characterized by having undergone all the phonetic changes experienced by the language. This differentiates it from the cultisms and semi-cultisms that were no longer used in the spoken language and were later reintroduced for restricted uses. Because of this, cultisms generally have not experienced some of the phonetic changes and present a different form than they would have if they had been transmitted with heritage words.
In the philological tradition of Spanish, a cultism is a word whose morphology very strictly follows its Greek or Latin etymological origin, without undergoing the changes that the evolution of the Spanish language followed from its origin in Vulgar Latin. The same concept also exists in other Romance languages. Reintroduced into the language for cultural, literary or scientific considerations, cultism only adapts its form to the orthographic and phonological conventions derived from linguistic evolution, and ignores the transformations that the roots and morphemes underwent in the development of the Romance language.
In some cases, cultisms are used to introduce technical or specialized terminology that, present in the classical language, did not appear in the Romance language due to lack of use; This is the case of many of the literary, legal and philosophical terms of classical culture, such as ataraxia (from the Greek ἀταραξία, "dispassion") or legislar (built from the Latin legislator). In other cases, they construct neologisms, such as the name of most scientific disciplines.
A semi-cultism is a word that did not evolve in the expected way, in the vernacular language (Romance language), unlike heritage words; its evolution is incomplete. Many times interrupted by cultural influences (ecclesiastical, legal, administrative, etc.). For the same reason, they maintain some features of the language of origin. Dios is a clear example of semi-cultism, where it came from the Latin Deus. It is a semi-cultism, because it maintains (without fully adapting to Castilianization, in this case) some characteristics of the Latin language—the ending in -s—, but, at the same time, it undergoes slight phonetic modifications (change of eu for io). Deus > Dios (instead of remaining cultist: Deus > *Deus, or becoming a heritage word: Deus > *Dío). The Catholic Church influenced by stopping the natural evolution of this word, and, in this way, converted this word into a semi-cultism and unconsciously prevented it from becoming a heritage word.
Spanish vocabulary has been influenced by several languages. As in other European languages, Classical Greek words (Hellenisms) are abundant in the terminologies of several fields, including art, science, politics, nature, etc.Bergua Cavero, J., Los helenismos del español : historia y sistema, Madrid (Gredos) 2004, Its vocabulary has also been influenced by Arabic, having developed during the Al-Andalus era in the Iberian Peninsula, with around 8% of its vocabulary having Arabic language lexical roots.
—OR—
: "El léxico español de procedencia árabe es muy abundante: se ha señalado que constituye, aproximadamente, un 8% del vocabulario total",,José Joaquín Martínez Egido (2025). 9788498226539, Liceus, Servicios de Gestió. . ISBN 9788498226539 It may have also been influenced by Basque language, Iberian language, Celtiberian, Gothic language, and other neighboring Ibero-Romance languages. Additionally, it has absorbed vocabulary from other languages, particularly other Romance languages such as French language, Mozarabic, Portuguese, Galician, Catalan language, Occitan language, and Sardinian, as well as from Quechua language, Nahuatl language, and other indigenous languages of the Americas. In the 18th century, words taken from French referring above all to fashion, cooking and bureaucracy were added to the Spanish lexicon. In the 19th century, new loanwords were incorporated, especially from English and German, but also from Italian in areas related to music, particularly opera and cooking. In the 20th century, the pressure of English in the fields of technology, computing, science and sports was greatly accentuated.
In general, Hispanic America is more susceptible to loanwords from English or Anglicisms. For example: Computer mouse (computer mouse) is used in Hispanic America, in Spain ratón is used. This happens largely due to closer contact with the United States. For its part, Spain is known by the use of Gallicisms or words taken from neighboring France (such as the Gallicism ordenador in European Spanish, in contrast to the Anglicism computador or computadora in American Spanish).
It is generally acknowledged that Portuguese and Spanish speakers can communicate in written form, with varying degrees of mutual intelligibility. Mutual intelligibility of the written Spanish and Portuguese languages is high, lexically and grammatically. Ethnologue gives estimates of the lexical similarity between related languages in terms of precise percentages. For Spanish and Portuguese, that figure is 89%, although phonologically the two languages are quite dissimilar. Italian on the other hand, is phonologically similar to Spanish, while sharing lower lexical and grammatical similarity of 82%. Mutual intelligibility between Spanish and French language or between Spanish and Romanian is lower still, given lexical similarity ratings of 75% and 71% respectively. Comprehension of Spanish by French speakers who have not studied the language is much lower, at an estimated 45%. In general, thanks to the common features of the writing systems of the Romance languages, interlingual comprehension of the written word is greater than that of oral communication.
The following table compares the forms of some common words in several Romance languages:
| italic=no1,2 "we (others)" | nosotros | nós, nosoutros3 | nós, nós outros3 | nós, nosotros | nusatros | nosaltres (arch. nós) | nous4 | noi, noialtri5 | noi | 'we' |
| italic=no "true brother" | hermano | irmán | irmão | hermanu | chirmán | germà (arch. frare)6 | frère | fratello | frate | 'brother' |
| italic=no (Classical Latin) "day of Mars" italic=no (Late Latin) "third (holi)day" | martes | Martes, Terza Feira | Terça-Feira | Martes | Martes | Dimarts | Mardi | Martedì | Marți | 'Tuesday' |
| italic=no | canción7 (arch. cançón) | canción, cançom8 | canção | canción (also canciu) | canta | cançó | chanson | canzone | cântec | 'song' |
| italic=no italic=no | más (arch. plus) | máis | mais | más | más (also més) | més (arch. pus or plus) | plus | più | mai | 'more' |
| italic=no | mano izquierda9 (arch. mano siniestra) | man esquerda9 | mão esquerda9 (arch. mão sẽestra) | manu izquierda9 (or esquierda; also manzorga) | man cucha | mà esquerra9 (arch. mà sinistra) | main gauche | mano sinistra | mâna stângă | 'left hand' |
| italic=no "thing" italic=no "no born thing" italic=no "crumb" | nada | nada (also ren and res) | nada (arch. rés) | nada (also un res) | cosa | res | rien, nul | niente, nulla mica (negative particle) | nimic, nul | 'nothing' |
| italic=no "form-cheese" | queso | queixo | queijo | quesu | queso | formatge | fromage | formaggio/cacio | caș10 | 'cheese' |
Judaeo-Spanish is in serious danger of extinction because many native speakers today are elderly as well as elderly olim (immigrants to Israel) who have not transmitted the language to their children or grandchildren. However, it is experiencing a minor revival among Sephardi communities, especially in music. In Hispanic American communities, the danger of extinction is also due to assimilation by modern Spanish.
A related dialect is Haketia, the Judaeo-Spanish of northern Morocco. This too, tended to assimilate with modern Spanish, during the Spanish occupation of the region.
Thus, the Spanish alphabet has the following 27 letters:
Since 2010, none of the digraphs (ch, ll, rr, gu, qu) are considered letters by the Royal Spanish Academy.
The letters k and w are used only in words and names coming from foreign languages (kilo, folklore, whisky, kiwi, etc.).
With the exclusion of a very small number of regional terms such as México (see Toponymy of Mexico), pronunciation can be entirely determined from spelling. Under the orthographic conventions, a typical Spanish word is stressed on the syllable before the last if it ends with a vowel (not including ) or with a vowel followed by or an ; 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 , especially when one of them is a stressed word and the other one is a clitic: compare el ('the', masculine singular definite article) with él ('he' or 'it'), or te ('you', object pronoun) with té ('tea'), de (preposition 'of') versus dé ('give' formal), and se (reflexive pronoun) versus sé ('I know' or imperative 'be').
The interrogative pronouns (qué, cuál, dónde, quién, etc.) also receive accents in direct or indirect questions, and some demonstratives (ése, éste, aquél, etc.) can be accented when used as pronouns. Accent marks used to be omitted on capital letters (a widespread practice in the days of and the early days of computers when only lowercase vowels were available with accents), although the Real Academia Española advises against this and the orthographic conventions taught at schools enforce the use of the accent.
When u is written between g and a front vowel e or i, it indicates a "hard g" pronunciation. A diaeresis ü indicates that it is not silent as it normally would be (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 (¿ and ¡, respectively) and closed by the usual question and exclamation marks.
Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in English:
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