Spanish: a short portrait

Where it comes from

Spanish is a Romance language: it grew out of the Latin spoken by Roman soldiers, settlers and traders. The Romans arrived on the Iberian Peninsula in 218 BC and stayed for some six hundred years, long enough for Latin to replace almost all the languages spoken there before — only Basque survived, and it is still spoken today.

The everyday Latin of the street changed slowly into local dialects. One of them belonged to Castile, a small kingdom in the north of the peninsula, and that is why Spanish is also called castellano. Many words show their Latin parent clearly, with a few regular changes: a Latin f at the start of a word often became a silent h, so filius gave hijo and facere gave hacer.

A short history

After Rome, Germanic Visigoths ruled the peninsula, but they adopted Latin rather than imposing their own language. In 711 Arabic-speaking armies crossed from North Africa, and for centuries much of the south, called al-Andalus, was an Arabic-speaking world. The Christian kingdoms in the north slowly pushed south, and Castile with its dialect came out ahead.

In the thirteenth century King Alfonso X of Castile had law, history and science written in Castilian rather than in Latin, which turned a spoken dialect into a language of learning. The year 1492 then brought three events at once: the fall of Granada, the last Muslim kingdom on the peninsula; Antonio de Nebrija’s grammar of Castilian, one of the first grammars of a modern European language; and Columbus’s first voyage across the Atlantic.

Over the following centuries Spanish spread through most of the Americas. Cervantes published Don Quijote in two parts, in 1605 and 1615, and in 1713 the Royal Spanish Academy (Real Academia Española) was founded to describe and guide the language. Today it works together with academies in the other Spanish-speaking countries, so the rules are agreed jointly rather than set in Madrid alone.

Where it is spoken today

Spanish is the official language of Spain, Mexico, most of Central and South America, Cuba, the Dominican Republic and Equatorial Guinea in Africa, and it is widely spoken in Puerto Rico and across the United States. Mexico has more Spanish speakers than any other country, Spain included.

There is no single «correct» Spanish, but there are two large families of accents and habits. In most of Spain z and c before e or i sound like the th in «think», so cerveza has two different sounds in it; in Latin America, the Canary Islands and parts of southern Spain both are pronounced like s. Spain uses vosotros for «you» in the plural among friends, while Latin America uses ustedes for everybody.

Some countries — Argentina and Uruguay above all — use vos instead of tú, with verb forms of its own: vos tenés rather than tú tienes. Everyday words differ too: a computer is an ordenador in Spain and a computadora in most of Latin America, and a car can be a coche, a carro or an auto depending on where you are. Speakers from both sides understand each other without trouble.

One more variety travelled with people rather than with an empire: when Jews were expelled from Spain in 1492, many kept their Spanish in their new homes around the Mediterranean, and Judaeo-Spanish, also called Ladino, is still spoken by a few today.

How Spanish is written

Spanish uses the Latin alphabet with one extra letter, ñ. Medieval scribes saved space by writing a double n as one n with a small mark above it, and that mark became the tilde. The pairs ch and ll were counted as letters of their own until 2010.

The spelling is one of the most regular in Europe: you can almost always say a word you have only read, and write a word you have only heard. The h is silent, and b and v sound the same. The written accent marks the stressed syllable whenever the usual rule does not, and it can change the meaning: público means «public», publico «I publish» and publicó «he published».

The upside-down marks at the start of a question or exclamation — ¿Dónde estás?, ¡Qué bien! — have been recommended since the eighteenth century. They tell a reader from the first word how to read the sentence aloud.

Words it gave and words it took

Centuries of Arabic left a deep mark, especially on words for food, farming, building and trade. Many of them still begin with al-, the Arabic article: la almohadapillowel aceiteoilel azúcarsugarel algodóncotton And ojalá, «hopefully», goes back to an Arabic phrase meaning «if God wills».

In the Americas Spanish met languages it had never heard, and many of their words passed through Spanish into English: «tomato» and «chocolate» come from Nahuatl, the language of the Aztecs; «hurricane», «canoe» and «barbecue» from Taíno in the Caribbean. English also took words straight from Spanish: «patio», «plaza», «siesta», «mosquito», «canyon», «ranch» and «guerrilla».

Today the traffic runs the other way as well, and Spanish usually gives English words a Spanish spelling: el fútbol, el líder, el estrés.

What tends to surprise English speakers

Spanish has two verbs for «to be». Ser says what something is; estar says where it is or how it is right now. Compare: es aburridohe is boringestá aburridohe is bored

The subject pronoun is usually left out, because the verb ending already says who is speaking: hablo is «I speak» with no «I» in sight. There are two past tenses where English mostly uses one, and the subjunctive, which English has nearly lost, is part of everyday talk. A double negative is simply correct: No veo nada is «I don’t see anything».

Plenty of words look familiar, and most of them are: English -tion is Spanish -ción, so nación and información need no translation. But a few are traps: embarazadapregnantconstipadohaving a coldéxitosuccesslibreríabookshop