Spanish History 101

What is popularly termed the “Spanish” language is more formally known as Castilian, after the Spanish region of Castile, where the language developed, to distinguish it from other languages such as Catalan or Galician that also developed on the Iberian Peninsula. Today Castilian Spanish has as many as 400 million speakers worldwide and is the official language of twenty-one countries, with significant Spanish-speaking populations in many more. Spanish is the second most-spoken language in the world, following Mandarin Chinese.

As with all other Romance languages, there is no clear line dividing Spanish from the Latin from which it grew. Classical Latin gave way to Vulgar Latin, the popular tongue used by the common people of the Roman Empire, and after that Empire’s fall, Vulgar Latin gradually drifted in Castile toward what we now know as Castilian Spanish. It did so with Germanic influence from the Visigoths and later with Arabic influence from the Moorish rulers of Spain. As it changed and grew, Spanish broke the long vowels of Latin into dipthongs, so that words like terra (land) became tierra and portus (harbor) became puerto. Similarly, the complex system of Latin noun declensions vanished.

After the Spanish monarchs retook the peninsula from the Moors, Spain began to direct its energies outward, expanding into a worldwide empire stretching from Latin America to Africa to Asia. These territories had Spanish imposed as their official language, and to this day, the tongue can be found, either officially or unofficially, in the former possessions of imperial Spain. Upon independence, most places, from Cuba to Venezuela to Equatorial Guinea, retained Spanish as the or a language of administration.

However, the Spanish of Latin America and the Spanish of Spain are different, roughly as different as the English of the United States and Britain. Latin Americans use ustedes, the formal form of “you” (plural) on all occasions, while in Spainthe informal vosotros is frequently used with friends and family. Some Iberian Spanish terms have offensive or vulgar connotations in Latin America; for example the word taco can be both a swearword (Spain) and a food (Mexico). A form of Standard Spanish is used internationally and is overseen by the Spanish Royal Academy in Madrid.