Spanish language

Spanish or Castilian (in its own language: español, castellano) is one of the Romance languages. It began as a variety of Latin in what is now northern Spain, and has since become one of the world's most widely-spoken languages. Its is nowadays the first spoken language and the state language of Spain, as well as of a majority of american countries which are, from north to south, Mexico, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Panama, Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, Paraguay, Uruguay, Argentina and Chile. In most of these countries, however, Spanish coexists with several minority languages. Spanish is also used by an important part of the population of the United States, has an official status in Equatorial Guinea and enjoys some diffusion in the Philippines, in Morocco and in Western Sahara.

Spanish is closely related to the following Romance languages:

• Asturian-Leonese (asturllionés)
• Galician-Portuguese (galegoportuguês)
• Aragonese (aragonés, fabla)
• Catalan (català)
• Occitan (occitan)

Ladino (djudeo-espanyol, sefardí) is a Spanish dialect.

Phonology

Due to a Basque substratum (which can also occur in the Gascon dialect of Occitan), but in all positions, Latin initial f- mutated into h- before a non-diphthongised vowel.

Writing system

Spanish uses a variant of the Roman alphabet containing twenty-seven letters, that is, the typical twenty-six letters plus Ñ:

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N Ñ O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

Between 1754 and 2010, the graphemes CH and LL were considered as letters of the alphabet, CH being located after C and LL after L. For instance, cuyo with c (“whose”) was followed by chacal with ch (“jackal”). In 1994, CH and LL were still considered as letters but had to respect the typical, international, alphabetical order, that is, chacal was set before cuyo. In 2010, CH and LL were no longer considered as letters.

The letters bear the following names:

A (a), B (be), C (ce), D (de), E (e), F (efe), G (ge), H (hache), I (i), J (jota), K (ka), L (ele), M (eme), N (ene), Ñ (eñe), O (o), P (pe), Q (cu), R (erre), S (ese), T (te), U (u), V (uve, ve), W (uve doble, doble ve), X (equis), Y (ye, i griega), Z (zeta).

The two graphemes which are no longer letters still bear letter names: CH (che), LL (elle).

The Spanish diacritic marks are:

• The acute accent on á, é, í, ó, ú.
• The tilde on ñ.
• The dieresis on ü.

Spanish spelling is quite simple and easy to learn, since each grapheme has to be read in a precise way and most phonemes can be represented by only one grapheme. Exceptions exist but are few.

Spanish around the world

The Philippines

In 2007, the Instituto Cervantes in Manila requested of the Philippine government to reinstate the status of Spanish as an official language, prior to current president's Gloria Arroyo's state visit to Spain in December 2007.

See also

• Romance languages
• Rioplatense Spanish