Spanish language

Dark Blue: Countries where Spanish is an official language. Blue: States of the U.S. where Spanish is not an official language but is spoken by 25% or more of the people who live there. Light Blue: States of the U.S. where Spanish is not an official language but is spoken by 5-20% of the people who live there.

The Spanish language is one of the Romance languages that came from the Latin language. It is the most common Romance language.

General Information

The Spanish language is used by many people in the world today. This is partly because the people of Spain travelled to and colonized many different parts of the world. They created many new countries, and also new governments in some old countries. The countries that have Spanish as an official language are called the Hispanic countries. Most of them are in the Americas.

Some examples of places where Spanish is an important language are:

In North America, Central America, and the Caribbean Islands:

• Costa Rica
• Cuba
• The Dominican Republic
• Guatemala
• Honduras
• Mexico
• Nicaragua
• Panama
• Puerto Rico
• El Salvador.

In the United States and Belize, most people use the English language, but Spanish is the second most-used language.

In South America:

• Argentina
• Bolivia
• Chile
• Colombia
• Ecuador
• Guyana
• Paraguay
• Peru
• Uruguay
• Venezuela

The official language of Brazil is Portuguese, but many Brazilians learn Spanish as a second language.

In other parts of the world:

• The Philippines
• Equatorial Guinea.

In Spain, there are other languages that also came from Latin that are connected to Spanish, like Catalan and Galician.

Portuguese, which is spoken in Portugal and Brazil, has a very close relation with Spanish. Basque is also spoken, but it is not related to Spanish. Therefore, the Spanish language is sometimes called Castilian, named after Castile, a region in Spain where the language came from. Many people defend that the most correct name for the language is Castilian because before the existence of Spain as a country the language already existed, while others say it is better to call it Spanish bacause they say that Castilian is the accent of Spaniards (though Spain is a small country and it has very varied accents).

The Spanish word for Spanish is "Español", and the Spanish word for Castilian is "Castellano".

In the other Romance languages spoken on the Iberian Peninsula, such as Galician, Catalan, Asturian, and others, the designation is "Castellán", "Castellà", etc., and the word "Spanish" is rarely used to refer the language. In Spain, the name of the subject in schools is "Lengua Castellana" (Castilian Language). In monolingual zones of Spain people can say "Spanish" to refer to their language.

In Portuguese it's common to use the word "castelhano" when talking about this language too.

Statistics

In 2009 for the first time in History the Spanish was the first "mother tongue" language of the western world, bypassing the English language, and the second on earth

Spanish is spoken by 358 million people in the world as their first language, while English is only 350 million. This is because of the huge increase of population in Latin-American Spanish-speaking countries.

Other websites

This language has its own Wikipedia Project.

See the Spanish language edition

• Ethnologue report for Spanish
• Spanish evolution from Latin
• (Spanish) Dictionary of the RAE Real Academia Española's official Spanish language dictionary
• Spanish phrasebook on WikiTravel
• Spanish verb conjugations
• Random Spanish Audio Examples
• The Project Gutenberg EBook of A First Spanish Reader by Erwin W. Roessler and Alfred Remy.