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The language known today as Spanish is derived from spoken Latin, which was brought to the Iberian Peninsula by the Romans after their occupation of the peninsula that started in the late 3rd century BC. Today it is the world's 4th most widely spoken language, after English, Mandarin Chinese and Hindi. [1]
- Latin Arrives in A New Land
- Spanish Survives The Fall of Rome
- Another Conquest: 700 Years of Arabic Influence
- Castilian Spanish Is Empowered by The Reconquista
- Spanish Becomes Its Own Language
- 1492 Spreads Spanish Around The World
- Modern Spanish Keeps Changing and Innovating
- When It Comes to Spanish, Todo Fluye
Spanish is a Romance language, like French and Italian, but the story of Spanish starts well before the Romans arrived in modern-day Spain. From about 1100 BCE to the third century BCE, there were Celts, Iberians (who gave the Iberian Peninsulaits name!), Tartessians, Aquitanians (who might have been speaking an early form of Basque), and people sp...
After the fall of the Roman Empire in the 5th century CE, the Visigoths moved into the Iberian Peninsula and established a kingdom. They spoke a Germanic language (from the same family as English and German), but they had been interacting with Romans for a long time so they also spoke Latin (hooray for bilingualism!). Since they already knew Latin,...
In 711 CE, a coalition of Arabic-speaking Muslims from North Africa conquered the Visigoths and took control of the majority of Hispania. The Moors (as they were called by Christian Europeans) named their states in Iberia Al-Andalus,which is where the name of the Spanish region Andalucía comes from! During their 700 years in Hispania, the Moors liv...
Just a few years after the Moors arrived in Hispania, the Christian kingdoms in the north of the peninsula (which hadn't been conquered) began the Reconquista,a military campaign to reclaim the southern territories. During this era, Iberian Romance (what had been the dialect of Latin spoken in Hispania) really became a language distinct from Latin....
Through the Reconquista, documents continued to be transcribed in Latin. Latin itself was now also mostly for wealthy, educated elites, and everyday people were more familiar with the Castilian dialect that was evolving further and further away from Latin. We can see the evolution of this new language in early documents written for common people (s...
1492 wasn't only the year that Christopher Columbus (Cristóbal Colón) reached the Americas—and brought Spanish with him—it was also the year in which Queen Isabel of Castile and King Fernando of Aragon expelled all practicing Muslims and Jews from Spain in the Spanish Inquisition. Sephardic Jews settled around the world, including in North Africa, ...
In the centuries since 1492, Spanish has become the language of more than 548 million people. After Spanish-speaking Muslims and Jews were forced out of Spain, Christian Spaniards began colonizing the Americas, and their ruthless conquest spread Spanish to a new hemisphere. As a result of contact between Spanish and indigenous American languages an...
Tracing its origins to Latin, Spanish has experienced constant flux, change and evolution in the eighteen centuries from the arrival of the Romans to the vast Spanish-speaking population around the world today. From a relatively remote provincial dialect, it has developed into one of the top 5 most-spoken languages in the world. And it doesn’t show...
The Spanish language arrived in Latin America as a tool of Iberian colonization. Indigenous languages struggled to survive under the implacable presence of an imperial tongue serving not only to make all subjects part of the Spanish Empire but also, and primarily, as a mechanism to evangelize a population considered by the conquistadors ...
Although the Americas became independent between the American Revolution in the 1770s and the end of South American Wars of Independence in the 1820s, the newly independent nations retained their colonial languages including English, Spanish and Portuguese.
Slowly at first, possibly beginning with simple sounds made by our ancestors Homo heidelbergenis, and then increasingly rapidly until there were thousands of languages spoken around the planet. But this has been fiercely debated and much is still not understood.
Jan 18, 2019 · In the Anglo-Saxon period, English was “very much a vernacular, a lesser language; not the language of the educated elite” – which was Latin.
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Oct 12, 2024 · English language, a West Germanic language of the Indo-European language family that is closely related to the Frisian, German, and Dutch languages. It originated in England and is the dominant language of the U.S., the U.K., Canada, Australia, Ireland, and New Zealand.
