Spanish language
Spanish or Castilian language is a Romance one originally from the North of Spain. The Spanish language is the official one in Spain, most Latin American nations and one of the official ones of Equatorial Guinea, in Africa. In total, twenty-five countries and territories speak Spanish as their primary language. Moreover, Spanish is an important language in many others.
The Spanish language originated as a Latin dialect along the remote cross road strips among the Cantabria, Burgos, Soria and La Rioja provinces of the North of Spain inside the Kingdom of Castile. Its use gradually spread, where it evolved and finally became the most important language of the government and trade Spanish explorers and colonists. Later brought Spanish to the Americas and other parts of the world in the last five centuries.
Between 322 and 400 million people speak Spanish natively, making this language the most spoken Romance one and likely the second most spoken by number of native speakers. It is believed that the number of native and non-native Spanish speakers is around 500 million, probably making this language the fourth most spoken one by total number of speakers.
Spanish is one of six official working languages of the United Nations. Spanish language is spoken most extensively in Spain, the Americas and to a small extent in Asia Pacific and Africa. Spanish language is also the second most widely spoken language in the USA and by far the most popular studied foreign language in the United States schools and Universities. Within the globalized market, there is currently a recognition and international expansion of the Spanish language in the film industry, literature, music and television.
Naming
This language is known as "español" by Spanish people when contrasting it with languages of foreign states, such as French and English, but call it castellano, i.e. Castilian, the language of the Castile region, when comparing it with other languages of Spain (such as Galician, Basque, and Catalan), or even to other native languages, in some Hispanic American nations. Like that, the Spanish Constitution of 1978 uses the term castellano to define the official language of the whole country, as opposed to las demás lenguas españolas (lit. the other Spanish languages).
"Castilian" is used by some philologists only when speaking of the language spoken in Castile during the Middle Ages, claiming that it is preferable to use "Spanish" for its modern form. Nowadays, in northern parts, there are the subdialect of Spanish, which is also called "Castilian" sometimes. This dialect is different from those of other regions of Spain (Madrid or Andalusia for instance); the Castilian dialect is considered in Spain to be the same as standard Spanish.
However, the name castellano is frequently used for the language as a whole in Latin America. Some Spanish speakers consider castellano a generic term with no ideological or political links, much as "Spanish" is in English. Latin Americans often use this term to differentiate their own variety of Spanish as opposed to the variety of Spanish spoken in Spain, or vice-versa, to refere to that variety of Spanish which is considered as standard in this one.
Classification of Spanish and related languages
Castilian/ Spanish language has closest affinity to the other West Iberian Romance ones: Asturian, Galician, Ladino, and Portuguese, as well as, in some ways, to Aragonese and Catalan.
Catalan, spoken in the East, exhibits many Gallo-Romance traits and is more similar to the Occitan language (occitan) than Portuguese and Spanish are to each other. Spanish and Portuguese share similar grammars and many words as well as a common history of Arabic influence while a great part of the peninsula was under Islamic rule (both languages expanded over Islamic territories). It is estimated that they have 89% of lexical similarity.
Ladino language
Ladino, basically medieval Castilian and closer to modern Spanish than any other language, is spoken by many descendants of the Sephardic Jews who were expelled in the 15th century from Spain. In many ways, this language is not a different one, but a dialect of Castilian. Ladino lacks native American words, influential during colonial times. Ladino language contains other vocabulary from Turkish, Hebrew and from other languages spoken wherever the Sephardis settled.
-Translation Spanish-
Spanish vocabulary comparison
Spanish and Italian are very similar by means of phonological system and do not differ very much in vocabulary, grammar and above all morphology. Speakers of these languages can communicate relatively well: nowadays, the lexical similarity between Spanish and Italian is estimated at 82%. Consequently, these languages are mutually intelligible to various degrees. With French and Romanian, mutual intelligibility is lower (lexical similarity is respectively 75% and 71%) and for French "understanding" of Spanish from French speakers (with no knowledge of the Spanish language) falls at an estimated 45% - as much as English. Since the common characteristics of the writing systems of the Romance languages, the reading comprehension is easier than oral communication.
Characterization of the Spanish language
The diphthongization of the Latin short vowels e and o into ie and ue, respectively, when they were stressed was one defining feature of the Spanish language. In other Romance languages, similar sound changes can be found, but in Spanish they were particularly important.
The mutation of Latin initial f- into h- whenever it was followed by a vowel which did not diphthongate was more peculiar to early Spanish (as in the Gascon dialect of Occitan, and possibly due to a Basque substratum).
Some consonant clusters of Latin also produced normally dissimilar results in these languages.