Inquisitive Pidgin
A blog dedicated to exploring any and every aspect of any language
Spanish
- One of the five original languages, Spanish orginated in Spain (hence the name) It is spoken in many regions of the world including Spain, Columbia, Hondurus, Puerto Rico, Peru, Venezuela, Ecuador, Guatemala, Cuba, Bolivia,Paraguay, El Salvador, Costa Rica, Panama, Equatorial Guinea, Mexico, Argentina, Chile, Dominican Republic, Nicaragua, and Uruguay.
- Spanish originated in Castille, a region in Spain. This is why it's sometimes called "Castillian".
- Approximately 414 million people speak Spanish as a native language, making it second only to Mandarin in terms of its number of native speakers worldwide.
- Spanish is a part of the Ibero-Romance group of languages, which evolved from several dialects of common Latin in Iberia after the collapse of the Western Roman Empire in the fifth century. It was first documented in central-northern Iberia in the ninth century and gradually spread with the expansion of the Kingdom of Castile into central and southern Iberia.
- From its beginnings, Spanish vocabulary was influenced by its contact with Basque and by other related Ibero-Romance languages and later absorbed many Arabic words during the Muslim presence in the Iberian Peninsula.
- Spanish is the most popular second language learned by native speakers of American English. From the last decades of the 20th century, the study of Spanish as a foreign language has grown significantly, in part because of the growing populations and economies of many Spanish-speaking countries, and the growing international tourism in these countries.
- Spanish is the most widely understood language in the Western Hemisphere, with significant populations of native Spanish speakers ranging from the tip of Patagonia to as far north as Canada and since the early 21st century, it has arguably superseded French as the second-most-studied language and the second language in international communication, after English.