Spanish language

Spanish

Spanish
Spanish, or the story of a dialect which conquered the world...

Spoken by more than 350 million people throughout the world, Spanish is now the most important international language along with English... difficult to imagine that in the 10th century Castillian was only a simple dialect spoken in the north of the peninsula, in a sort of fortified march in the Cantabriques mountains to the east of Leon! This origin is reflected in the name Castille, Castilla which comes from the Latin 'castellum' or 'mighty castle'.

During the Conquest (800-1492), Castillian was used considerably on the territory of the peninsula, became standardized and little by little became the Spanish language. It was Alphonse X of Castille who triumphed Castillian as a literary language in the 13th century - even if Galaico-Portuguese was to dominate lyric literature until the 15th century. In 1492 Castillian crossed the Atlantic ocean, freshly equipped with the first European grammar written in Salamanca the same year by Antonio de Nebrija, establishing this dialect as the language of Spain. Starting from 1519, the conquistadors endowed Spain with a gigantic colonial empire and Castillian was imposed on the immense territories of the New World which spread from Mexico to South Chile. From the 16th to the 17th centuries, the 'golden age' of Spain was also that of the Spanish language and the novel reached its highest level of universality and expression with 'Don Quijote' by Miguel de Cervantès or the picaresque novels 'Lazarillo de Tormes' and that of Mateo Aleman 'Guzman, de Alfarache'.

National language: Spain, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, Salvador, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Panama, Colombia, Venezuela, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, Paraguay, Uruguay, Argentina, Chile, Equatorial Guinea. Spanish is also spoken in the Philippines and the United States where the growing Spanish-speaking population makes Spanish the second language of the United States.

European countries where Spanish is the language most taught as a foreign language: France, Bulgaria, Sweden, Denmark, Luxembourg, Ireland and Germany.

Classification by language family:
Indo-European>Latin>Romance>Northern Ibero-Romance>Castillian.