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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...
With the advance of the Romans, Latin spread across the region and created linguistic unity. The Latin that arrived was not classic Latin but a colloquial dialect called vulgar. With the...
Jul 9, 2021 · Having surveyed some kinds of variation within English, we can now turn to the processes that, over 20 or so centuries “turned Latin into Spanish.” This kind of change is rarely abrupt: we’re not likely to find a date on which it would be meaningful to say, “Here’s when people stopped speaking Latin and started speaking Spanish.”
Nov 2, 2020 · Spanish originated in the Iberian Peninsula as a dialect of spoken Latin, which is today called “Vulgar Latin,” as opposed to the Classical Latin used in literature. The dialect of Spanish that we consider dominant in Europe is called Castellano or Castilian Spanish.
Jun 11, 2020 · Spanish belongs to the Indo-European family and derives many of its rules of grammar and syntax from Latin; around 75% of Spanish words have Latin roots. However, Spanish has also other influences such as Celtiberian, Basque, Gothic, Arabic, and some of the native languages of the Americas.
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Is Spanish a Latin language?
Which events marked the evolution of the Spanish language? Latin is considered the base of the Spanish language, though a long succession of cultures contributed to enrich the language. However, over the centuries, Spanish or Castilian was a spoken language while Latin remained the official one.
