The Spanish Language

History of the Spanish Language

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When we refer to Spanish we are referring to the main language of Spain, Castillano. This is spoken with different accents throughout Spain. The heaviest and most notable accent is that of Andalucía. (Andaluz) There are three  other languages spoken in certain regions of Spain.  Basque, Catalan and Gallego.

Orthographic accent marks — used in Modern Spanish to mark the vowel of the stressed syllable in words where stress is not predictable from rules — come into use sporadically in the 15th century, and massively in the 16th century. Their use begins to be standardized with the advent of the Spanish Royal Academy in the 18th century.

Castilian Spanish originated, after the decline of the Roman Empire, as a continuation of spoken Latin in the Cantabrian Mountains, in northern Spain, in the 8th and 9th centuries AD, according to most authorities; but others claim it came from Franco-Navarrese and Gothic-Castilian dialects in the 11th century AD. With the Reconquista, this northern dialect spread to the south, where it almost entirely replaced or absorbed the provincial dialects, at the same time as it borrowed massively from the vocabulary of Moorish Arabic and was influenced by Mozarabic (the Romance speech of Christians living in Moorish territory) and medieval Judeo-Spanish. These languages all but vanished in the Iberian Peninsula by the late 16th century.

The prestige of Old Castile and its language was propagated partly by the exploits of Castilian heroes in the battles of the Reconquista among them Fernánd González and Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar (El Cid) and by the narrative poems about them that were recited in Castilian even outside the original territory of that dialect.

The "first written Spanish" is traditionally considered to have appeared in the Glosas Emilianenses. These are "glosses" (translations of isolated words and phrases in a form more like Spanish than Latin) added between the lines of a manuscript that was written  earlier in Latin. Estimates of their date vary from the late 10th to the early 11th century.

The first steps toward standardization of written Castilian were taken in the 13th century by King Alfonso X of Castile, known as Alfonso el Sabio (Alfonso the Wise). He assembled scribes at his court and supervised their writing, in Castilian, of extensive works on history, astronomy, law, and other fields of knowledge.

Antonio de Nebrija wrote the first grammar of Spanish, Gramática de la lengua castellana, and presented it, in 1492, to Queen Isabella, who is said to have had an early appreciation of the usefulness of the language as a tool of hegemony, as if anticipating the empire that was about to be founded with the voyages of Columbus.

The Spanish language, like Icelandic, Arabic, and many languages with a classical age, can be read with little help as far back as documents written in the 1100s and before.

The Spanish Royal Academy was founded in 1713, largely with the purpose of preserving the "purity" of the language. The Academy published its first dictionary in six volumes over the period 1726–1739, and its first grammar in 1771, and it continues to produce new editions of both from time to time. Each of the Spanish-speaking countries has an analogous language academy, and an Association of Spanish Language Academies was created in 1951.

Beginning in the 16th century, Spanish colonization brought the language to the Americas (Mexico, Central America, and western South America), where it is spoken today, as well as to several island groups in the Pacific where it is no longer spoken by any large numbers of people: the Philippines, Palau, the Marianas (including Guam), and what is today the Federated States of Micronesia.

Use of the language in the Americas was continued by descendants of the Spaniards, both by Spanish creoles and by what had then become the mixed Spanish-Amerindian (mestizo) majority. After the wars of independence fought by these colonies in the 19th century, the new ruling elites extended their Spanish to the whole population to strengthen national unity, and the encouragement of all natives to become fluent in Spanish has had a certain amount of success, except in very isolated parts of the former Spanish colonies.

Language politics under General Franco declared Spanish as the only official language in Spain, and to this day it is the most preferred language in government, business, public education, the workplace, cultural arts, and the media. But in the 1960s and 1970s, the Spanish parliament agreed to allow provinces to use, speak, and print official documents in three other languages: Catalan for Catalonia, Basque for the Basque provinces, and Galician for Galicia. Since the early 1980s after Spain became a multi-party democracy, these regional and minority languages have rebounded in common usage as secondary languages, but Spanish remains the universal language of the Spanish people.

When the United Nations organization was founded in 1945, Spanish was designated one of its five official languages (along with Chinese, English, French, and Russian; a sixth language, Arabic, was added in 1973).

Alphabet

Pronunciation

Vowels

• A is pronounced similarly to the "a" in "father" or the "o" in "loft." Examples: madre, ambos, mapa. There are some speakers who sometimes pronounce the a something halfway between the "a" in "father" and the "a" in "mat," but in most areas the first sound given is standard.

• E is generally pronounced like the "e" in "met" when it is at the beginning or within a word. It is pronounced similarly to the Canadian "eh," kind of a shortened version of the "é" in the English "café," when it is at the end of the word. Sometimes it can be somewhere between those two sounds. It's not quite the sound of the English letter "A," which if pronounced slowly often has an "ee" sound at the end, but closer to the "e" of "met." Keep in mind that even when it's at the end of the word, in a sentence it may sound more like the "e" of met. For example, in a phrase such as de vez en cuando, each e has approximately the same sound. Examples: café, compadre, embarcar, enero

• I is pronounced similarly to the "ee" in "feet" and the "e" in "me," although usually a little briefer. Examples: finca, timbre, mi.

• O is pronounced is pronounced like the "oa" in "boat" or the "o" in "bone," although usually a little briefer. Example: teléfono, amo, foco

• U is generally pronounced like the "oo" in "boot" or the "u" in "tune." Do not pronounced it like the "u" in "uniform." Examples: universo, reunión, unidos. In the combinations gui and gue, as well as after q, the u is silent. Examples: guía, guerra, quizás. If the u should be pronounced between a g and i or e, an umlaut (sometimes called a dieresis) is placed over it. Examples: vergüenza, lingüista

Consonants

• C,  is pronounced like the "c" "th" in "thin" when it comes before an e or i and like the "c" in "car" when it is other positions. Examples: complacer, hacer, ácido, carro, acabar, crimen.
  
   
• CH is pronounced the same as the "ch" in "church." Examples: chico, machismo, Chile.
  
   
• F is pronounced like the "f" in "fox." Examples: eficaz, frío, frenes.
  
   
• K has basically the same sound in Spanish, although somewhat softer. It is found primarily in words of foreign origin. Examples: kilómetro, Irak.

• M is pronounced like the "m" in "mother." Examples: madre, música, embajada.
  
   
• P is pronounced like the "p" in "spot." Note that the "p" in "spot" is softer and less explosive than the "p" in "pot." Examples: papas, padre, suponer.
  
   
• Q is pronounced the same as the k. Note that the u following a q is not pronounced. Examples: quetzal, siquiatra, que.
  
   
• S is pronounced like the "s" in "simple." You do not give it the "z" sound heard in "wears" and many other English plural words, although it can be slightly voiced (like a soft "z") when it comes before an m, b, d, v, g, l, n or r. Examples: Susana, seres humanos, sencillo, fantasma.
  
   
• T is pronounced like the "t" in "stop." Note that the "t" of "stop" is softer and less explosive than the "t" of "top." Examples: todo, yate, temer.
  
   
• W is pronounced like the "w" in "water." It is found primarily in words of foreign origin. Examples: kilowatt, Zimbabwe.
  
   
• Y is generally pronounced the same as in English.

• B and V are pronounced exactly the same. In fact, one of the few spelling problems that many Spanish speakers have is with these two letters, because they don't distinguish them at all from their sound. Generally, the b and v are pronounced like the "b" in "beach." When either of the letters is between two vowels, the sound is formed kind of like the English "v," except that the sound is made by touching the lips together instead of the upper teeth and lower lip. Examples: bebé, árbol, vaca.
  
   
• D generally is pronounced somewhat like the "d" in "diet," although often the tongue touches the bottom of the teeth instead of the top. But when d comes between vowels, it has a much softer sound, kind of like the "th" in "that." Examples: derecho, helado, diablo.
  
   
• G is pronounced much like the English "g" in "go," except when it precedes an i or e. In those cases, it is pronounced like the Spanish j. Examples: gordo, gritar, gigante, mágico.
  
   
• H is always silent. Examples: hermano, hacer, deshacer.
  
   
• J (and the g when before an e or i) can be difficult, as its sound, that of the German ch, is absent in English except for a few foreign words where it is sometimes retained, as in the final sound of loch or the initial sound of Channukah. The sound is sometimes described as a heavily aspirated "h," made by expelling air between the back of the tongue and the soft palate. If you can't pronounce it well, you'll be understood by using the "h" sound of "house," but it's worthwhile to work on the correct pronunciation. Examples: garaje, juego, jardín.
  
   
• L is always pronounced like the first "l" in "little," never like the second one. Examples: los, helado, pastel.
  
   
• LL is usually pronounced like the "y" in "yellow."  Examples: llama, calle, caballo.
  
   
• N usually has the sound of the "n" in "nice." If it is followed by a b, v, f or p, it has the sound of "m" in "empathy." Examples: no, en, en vez de, andar.
  
   
• Ñ is pronounced like the "ny" in "canyon." Examples: ñoño, cañón, campaña.
  
   
• R and RR are formed by a flap of the tongue against the roof of the mouth, or a trill.
  
   
• X varies in sound, depending on the origin of the word. It is often pronounced like the "x" in "example" or "exit,"   Examples: éxito, experiencia, México, Xela.
  
   
• Z generally sounds like the "s" in "simple." In Spain it is often pronounced like the "th" in "thin." Examples: zeta, zorro, vez.

Numbers

 

0	1	2	3	4	5	6	7
zero cero	one uno	two dos	three tres	four cuatro	five cinco	six seis	seven siete
8	9	10	11	12	13	14	15
eight ocho	nine nueve	ten diez	eleven once	twelve doce	thirteen trece	fourteen catorce	fifteen quince

colours

	black	negro
	blue	azul
	brown	marrón
	green	verde
	grey	gris
	orange	naranja, anaranjado
	pink	rosado
	purple	violeta, morado
	red	rojo
	white	blanco
	yellow	amarillo

Restaurant

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