The Spanish language has an estimated 400.000.000 of native speakers, which makes it the third most spoken language, after Mandarin Chinese and English. But the are much more reduced than the Mandarin and English origins in terms of geographical space and number of people that speaks the language.
In this article we are going to present a brief , first in Spain and then in Latin America.
The linguistics roots of the Spanish language are based on the . There are more European languages based on the Romance too, like the Portuguese, French and Italian languages. Romance languages are the ones originated from Vulgar Latin.
The Romance languages have evolved during time due to the influence and contact with other languages and dialects. The languages have taken lots of cultural and linguistic aspects found in little known dialects around the world. For example, the takes influences from the Iberian and Celtic traditions.
There is a vast amount of vocabulary words taken from the Greek language. These words were adopted by Latin speakers and, then, by Spanish speakers.
The in the Iberian peninsula also brought lots of influences into the language. This phenomenon produced a number of new words, names and last names from the Arab tradition being used by Spanish speakers.
The Spanish language is also known as Castellano (Castillian), especially in some territories of Spain. This is due to its beginnings in the region of Castilla, a region located in the north-central part of Spain.
Spanish as a common language for Spain was dictated in part by the territorial unity of the country. Spain reached this unity once they set themselves
Castilla and its linguistic traditions expanded to most of the Iberian Peninsula, by the end of the 15th century. The Spanish state was born later, after the marriage of Isabel I of Castilla and Fernando II de Aragón.
Castillian language reached its most remarkable importance and identity. evolved during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries into what it is now. Several changes in the traditions and linguistic evolution produced the language the way we use it these days.
However, Spanish, especially spoken Spanish, is not the same in all the Spanish territory. It has different versions and dialects that are used in different states. There are some differences in its lexical and pronunciation aspects that makes them look like totally different languages.
Luckily, there exists the Real Academia De La Lengua Española, an entity created to protect and rule .
According to historians, the Spanish language arrived to America thanks to Christopher Columbus. After that, the rest of colonizers helped the process at the end of the fifteenth century, when the Spanish language was already totally consolidated in the Iberian Peninsula.
In America, Spanish took some more time to establish through a process known as “hispanización”.
The American continent had that were spoken from north to south, which made the cultures in the continent extremely different from the Spanish culture. Spanish conquerors had to use gestures to communicate with the natives, until they taught Spanish to some captives that were used as interpreters.
When the Spanish language started to expand throughout Latin America, helped to improve the process, especially the Jesuit and Franciscan missionaries.
Children and teenagers were converted into Catholicism in the schools the missionaries established in ”the new world”. This allowed the Spanish language to slowly penetrate natives’ culture and traditions, until it became the most used language by indigenous people.
So, along with the evangelization, the language started to become part of their lives until it was imposed. Amerindian dialects were set to a second position.
The Spanish people settled in The American Continent were always a minority, which allowed their traditions and culture to be influenced as well. The mixing of the languages and people brought as a result the incorporation of aspects of the pre-Columbian cultures into ”American Spanish”.
As there were African slaves in America, their language and traditions also contributed many aspects to the new cultural mixture.
People’s accents in the South American countries are more similar to their several native dialects than to the Spanish spoken in the Iberian Peninsula. Their vocabulary has also been influenced by the native languages, mainly by the náhuatl, spoken by the Aztecs and the quechua, spoken by the Incas.
As the Aztec and Inca civilizations were the two most predominant in the continent their languages were the most important as well. Even after the Spanish arrived, the two languages were used broadly for commerce purposes.
Besides all the aspects mentioned before, the Spanish conquerors met in Seville, Andalucía, where the Andalusian dialect was dominant. When they arrived at America they brought some influences from this dialect as well, enriching the multicultural variety presented in the nowadays.
This is a brief history of the Spanish language as it is known these days.
Spanish language school in Vitoria
Image by Zador Spanish schools Spain
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