Spanish language

Spanish language
Spoken in	Spanish-speaking countries Official, co-official or national language Argentina Bolivia Chile Colombia Costa Rica Cuba Ecuador El Salvador Spain Guatemala Equatorial Guinea Honduras Mexico Nicaragua Panama Paraguay Peru Dominican Republic Uruguay Venezuela Dependent territory Puerto Rico Significant language Andorra Belize Gibraltar Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic United States
Official language in	See list. 20 countries Argentina Bolivia Chile Colombia Costa Rica Cuba Ecuador El Salvador Spain Guatemala Equatorial Guinea Honduras Mexico Nicaragua Panama Paraguay Peru Dominican Republic Uruguay Venezuela 1 dependent entity Puerto Rico 3 states of the United States, as an administrative language California (by area, depending on the number of speakers) New Mexico (statewide) Texas (on websites) State with limited recognition Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic International organizations ACP Interpol OEI UN OSCE African ECCAS AU American ALADI ALBA-TCP CAN CELAC Mercosur OAS SICA NAFTA UNASUR European Europol EU Antarctic Antarctic Treaty
Region	Iberian Peninsula Hispanic America Hispanic Africa
Speakers	675 million
Native speakers	499 million 499 million native speakers (L1) 18 million as L2 with native proficiency
Second-language speakers	99 million 76 million people with limited proficiency 23 million students
Ranking	2nd
Language family	Indo-European  Italic   Latino-Faliscan     Romance      Western Romance       Ibero-Romance        Western Ibero-Romance        Spanish or Castilian
Dialects	See Dialectal varieties of Spanish
Writing system	Latin alphabet, Spanish Braille
Regulated by	Association of Academies of the Spanish Language
ISO 639-1	es
ISO 639-2	spa
ISO 639-3	spa

The Spanish language (from the term hispaniolus in Medieval Latin, which was the diminutive of Hispanus, which in turn derived from Hispania, the name by which the ancient Romans referred to the Iberian Peninsula) is a Romance language descended from spoken Latin, belonging to the family of Indo-European languages.

It forms part of the Iberian group, and is largely derived from Castilian, the language originating in Castile, a medieval kingdom of the Iberian Peninsula. Although in some parts of the world it is also informally known as «castilla», the Academies of the Spanish Language do not recognize the term castilla as a synonym of Spanish language, in some rural and Indigenous areas of the Americas and the Philippines, since Spanish began to be taught shortly after the incorporation of the new territories into the Crown of Castile.

It is the second language in the world by number of native speakers (599 million) after Mandarin Chinese, and the third language in non-native speakers after English and Mandarin Chinese. Some 599 million people speak it as a first or second language with native proficiency, reaching 675 million when speakers with limited proficiency are included, among whom there are 23 million students. Thus, it can be considered the second language of international communication after English.

Spanish has the third-largest literate population in the world (5.47% of the total), being the third most used language for the production of information in the media, as well as the third language with the most Internet users, after Chinese and English, with some 364 million users, which represents 7.9% of the total. It is estimated that by the year 2050 the Spanish language will have 820 million speakers, and 1,200 million by the year 2100.

The language is spoken mainly in Spain and Hispanic America, as well as among communities of Spanish speakers residing in other countries, most notably the United States, with more than 40 million Spanish speakers. It is estimated that the United States will soon become the country with the second most Spanish speakers in the world, behind only Mexico. In some countries formerly under Spanish rule where Spanish is no longer the majority or official language, it still maintains great importance in the cultural, historical and often linguistic sense, as is the case of the Philippines and some islands of the Caribbean. In Equatorial Guinea, where it is an official language, it is widely known and taught in schools.

It is one of the six official languages of the United Nations. It is also an official language in several of the main international organizations ―the European Union, the African Union, the Organization of American States, the Organization of Ibero-American States, the North American Free Trade Agreement, the Union of South American Nations, the Caribbean Community, the African, Caribbean and Pacific States and the Antarctic Treaty, among others― and in the sports field, FIBA, FIFA, the International Association of Athletics Federations, etc.

Spanish in the world. Yearbook of the Instituto Cervantes 2023

Spanish, like other Romance languages, is the result of centuries of evolution from spoken Latin (called Vulgar Latin) from approximately the 3rd century. After the fall of the Roman Empire, the Vulgar Latin of Roman Hispania gradually transformed and diverged from the other variants of Latin spoken in other provinces of the former Empire. These transformations gave rise, after a slow evolution, to the different Romance languages that exist today.

In this sense, the Toledo School of Translators, sponsored by Alfonso the Wise, considerably promoted the spread of a revised version of the Castilian language which, while incorporating abundant scientific and technical vocabulary, simplified its syntax so that it would be comprehensible to people from diverse backgrounds, thus allowing it to reach a wider audience. The contributions, both oral and written, of the scholars under the direction of Alfonso X laid the foundations of the modern Spanish language with supranational reach.

Historical, social and cultural aspects

Name of the language

Etymology

According to the Royal Spanish Academy (RAE), the word español comes from the Medieval Latin Hispaniolus, which means "from Hispania" (Spain).

The Latin form HĬSPĀNĬOLUS comes from the Latin name of the province of HĬSPĀNĬA, which included the Iberian Peninsula, or rather, from its hypercorrect form. It should be remembered that in Late Latin the /H/ was not pronounced. The opening of the short Latin /Ĭ/ into /e/ would therefore have yielded in Proto-Romance: ESPAŇOL(U).

The other name, castellano (Castilian), comes from the Latin castellanus, which means from Castile, a medieval kingdom located in the central part of the Iberian Peninsula and the origin of this language.

Controversy over «español» or «castellano»

Main article: Controversy over the name of the Spanish language

The controversy over the terms "español" and "castellano" is mainly confined to the legal sphere in Spain. Worldwide, the language is overwhelmingly recognized as Spanish, and most people do not even understand the meaning of the term "castellano". However, in Spain there is extensive debate as to whether it is more appropriate to call the language spoken in Hispanic America, in Spain and in other Spanish-speaking areas by one term or the other, or whether both are perfectly synonymous and acceptable forms.

Like many of the controversies related to the naming of a language identifiable with a particular territory (español with Spain, and castellano with Castile, the old kingdom where the language arose and from which it began to be taught in the Americas), or which carries with it an ideology or a historical past that provokes rejection, or which involves a struggle in favor of a single name to facilitate its international identification and the localization of productions in that language (for example, on computer networks), the controversy is extralinguistic.

From a strictly linguistic point of view, it is not possible to justify a preference for one name or the other.

In the normative or prescriptive sphere, according to the norms established by the main language policy bodies of the Spanish-speaking area regarding the codification of the language standard (the Royal Spanish Academy and the Association of Academies of the Spanish Language), «castellano» and «español» are synonymous terms, although the Diccionario panhispánico de dudas, a work of this same normative institution, states: "The term español is more advisable because it lacks ambiguity, since it refers unequivocally to the language spoken today by nearly six hundred million people. Likewise, it is the name used internationally (Spanish, espagnol, Spanisch, spagnolo, etc.)."

Likewise, the normative dictionary published by the Royal Spanish Academy and the Association of Academies of the Spanish Language is titled Diccionario de la lengua española.

Certain authors have shown their preference for one term or the other, such as the Venezuelan linguist Andrés Bello, who titled his main work Gramática de la lengua castellana, or the Valencian Gregorio Mayans, who wrote the following in 1737 in his book Orígenes de la lengua española:

By «Spanish language» I mean that language which all we Spaniards usually speak when we wish to be perfectly understood by one another.

On the other hand, the Spanish Constitution of 1978, in its third article, uses the specific name «castellano» for the language, distinguishing it from the other «Spanish languages» that also exist, such as Basque, Aragonese, Catalan or Valencian, Astur-Leonese, Galician or Aranese.

As for philologists, some authors justify the preferential use of one term or the other on the basis of its origin and historical evolution, interpreted in different ways.

Current position of the RAE

Map of the use of the words «castellano» and «español» to refer to the name of the language.

The RAE currently prefers the use of the term «español» instead of the term «castellano», despite considering both valid to refer to the official name of the language; although it also considers Castilian a dialect of Spanish spoken in the Spanish region of Castile. Nevertheless, it should be mentioned that when the RAE was founded in 1713, taking the French and Italian academies as its model, it set as its essential objective the elaboration of a dictionary of the Castilian language, "the most copious that could be made". That purpose became a reality with the publication of the Diccionario de autoridades, published in six volumes between 1726 and 1739.

ESPAÑOL. To designate the common language of Spain and of many nations of the Americas, which is also spoken as a native language in other parts of the world, the terms castellano and español are both valid. The controversy over which of these names is more appropriate has now been overcome. The term español is more advisable because it lacks ambiguity, since it refers unequivocally to the language spoken today by more than four hundred million people. Likewise, it is the name used internationally (Spanish, espagnol, Spanisch, spagnolo, etc.). Although it is also a synonym of español, it is preferable to reserve the term castellano to refer to the Romance dialect born in the Kingdom of Castile during the Middle Ages, or to the dialect of Spanish currently spoken in this region. In Spain, the name castellano is also used when referring to the common language of the State in relation to the other co-official languages in their respective autonomous territories, such as Catalan, Galician or Basque.

— Diccionario panhispánico de dudas, 2005, pp. 271-272.

History

A page of the Cantar de mio Cid.

Main article: History of the Spanish language

The history of the Castilian language begins with the Vulgar Latin of the Roman Empire, specifically that of the central area of Hispania. After the fall of the Roman Empire in the 5th century, the influence of learned Latin on the common people gradually diminished. The spoken Latin of that time was the seedbed of the Hispanic Romance varieties, the origin of the Spanish language. In the 8th century, the Muslim invasion of the Iberian Peninsula led to the formation of two clearly differentiated areas. In al-Andalus, the Romance dialects grouped under the term Mozarabic were spoken, in addition to the languages of the invading minority (Arabic and Berber). Meanwhile, in the area where the Christian kingdoms formed a few years after the beginning of Muslim domination, a divergent evolution continued, in which several Romance varieties arose: Catalan, Navarro-Aragonese, Castilian, Astur-Leonese and Galician-Portuguese.

It is from the end of the 11th century that a process of assimilation or linguistic leveling began, mainly among the central Romance dialects of the Iberian Peninsula: Astur-Leonese, Castilian and Navarro-Aragonese, but also among the rest. This process is what would result in the formation of a common Spanish language, Spanish. More and more philologists defend this theory (Ridruejo, Penny, Tuten, Fernández-Ordóñez). The weight of the Mozarabic of Toledo, the city in which written Castilian began its standardization, has also been highlighted. However, other philologists continue to defend Pidal's postulates of the predominance of the Castilian dialect in the formation of Spanish and its expansion through a process of Castilianization across the rest of the peninsular territories.

The Castilian Romance dialect, one of the precursors of the Spanish language, is traditionally considered to have originated in the medieval County of Castile (southern Cantabria and northern Burgos), with possible Basque and Visigothic influence. The oldest texts containing features and words similar to Castilian are the documents written in Latin and known as the Cartularies of Valpuesta, preserved in the church of Santa María de Valpuesta (Burgos), a set of texts that are copies of documents, some written as early as the 9th century. The director of the Instituto Castellano y Leonés de la Lengua concluded that:

"that Latin 'was so far removed from correctness, it presented such an evolved or corrupted state …
It can be concluded that the language of the becerros of Valpuesta is a Latin language assaulted by a living language, of the street, which slips into these writings'".

The Glosas Emilianenses of the late 10th or early 11th century, preserved in the Monastery of Yuso in San Millán de la Cogolla (La Rioja), were considered by Ramón Menéndez Pidal to be the oldest testimony of the Spanish language. However, there are later theories that claim these documents correspond to Navarro-Aragonese Romance, not to Castilian Romance.

A decisive moment in the consolidation of the Spanish language came during the reign of Alfonso X of Castile (1252-1284). If the epic poems (cantares de gesta) were written in that vulgar language ―Castilian― and were popular for that very reason, one might think that the learned and literary works produced at the Toledan Court of that King should have been written in Latin, the only learned language that all of Christian Europe had admitted up to that time; that is why it was a true cultural revolution that Alfonso X the Wise decided to direct a good number of works of high culture written in a language until then disdained by educated people for being considered too prosaic. This led to the official recognition of Spanish, which from then on could alternate with Latin, a language respected by all learned people.

Spanish spread across the peninsula during the Late Middle Ages due to the continuous expansion of the Christian kingdoms in this period, in the so-called Reconquista. The incorporation of the kingdoms of León and Galicia into the Crown of Castile under Ferdinand III of Castile, the introduction of a Castilian dynasty into the Crown of Aragon with Ferdinand I of Aragon in 1410 and, later, the final peninsular union under the Catholic Monarchs increased the linguistic assimilation and leveling among the dialects of the different kingdoms.

Antonio de Nebrija, author of the Gramática, the first grammar of a modern European language to be published in print.

The first book printed in Spanish was published around 1472. By the 15th century, the common Spanish language had spread to a large part of the Iberian Peninsula. In 1492 the Sevillian Antonio de Nebrija published in Salamanca his Grammatica, the first treatise on the grammar of the Spanish language, and the first of a modern European language to be published "en molde" (in print). Also by Nebrija are the first "Reglas de ortografía en la lengua castellana", printed in Alcalá de Henares in 1517, in which he postulates orthography as a one-to-one relationship between pronunciation and writing.

It is estimated that by the middle of the 16th century 80% of Spaniards spoke Spanish. At that time the consonantal readjustment had already begun, which meant the reduction of the phonemic system, through the loss of the voicing feature, from six sibilant consonants to only two or three depending on the variety.

The colonization of the Americas, begun in the 16th century, spread Spanish across most of the American continent, taking loanwords that enriched its vocabulary from native languages such as Nahuatl or Quechua, languages on which it also had a notable impact. After achieving independence, the new American states began processes of linguistic unification that completed the spread of the Spanish language across the entire continent, from California to Tierra del Fuego.

Throughout the 17th and 18th centuries, countless public and private periodical publications appeared in Spanish. The first saw the light of day in Madrid in 1661 at the hands of Julián Paredes (Gazeta nueva), and it was followed by numerous publications in Salamanca, León, Granada, Seville and Zaragoza. Periodical publications in Spanish also began to appear in the bilingual territories. The first, in 1792, was the Diario de Barcelona, which was also the first Spanish-language newspaper of Catalonia. It was followed by El Correo de Gerona (1795), the Diario de Gerona (1807) and, even earlier, in other bilingual cities such as Palma de Mallorca (1778), Vigo or Bilbao. In the Americas, Spanish became the normal language of education, to the detriment of the general languages based on Indigenous languages. It is estimated that by around 1810 Spanish was known by a third of the inhabitants of Spanish America.

The Spanish language has always had numerous variants which, while respecting the main Latin trunk, have differences in pronunciation and vocabulary, as happens with any other language. To this must be added contact with the languages of the native populations, such as Aymara, Chibcha, Guarani, Mapudungun, Maya, Nahuatl, Quechua, Taíno and Tagalog, among others, which also made contributions to the lexicon of the language, not only in their areas of influence but in some cases to the global lexicon.

Geographic distribution

Geographic distribution of the Spanish language

Countries where Spanish is considered the official language de jure or de facto.

Spanish or Castilian is the official language of nineteen countries in America, as well as Spain and Equatorial Guinea, and has a certain degree of official recognition in the Philippines and in the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic (a country not internationally recognized), but its speakers are distributed across the five continents:

America

Percentage of Spanish speakers in the states of the American continent.

50% 30%

20% 10%

5% 2%

Around 90% of all Spanish speakers in the world, some 400 million people, are found in America. In addition to 19 countries of Hispanic America, Spanish is spoken by a significant part of the population of the United States, mainly recent immigrants. In both Latin America and the United States there is a significant increase in the number of speakers. Previous presidents of the United States have knowledge of the language, and Barack Obama studied it and has good pronunciation when reading.

Hispanic America

Most Spanish speakers are found in Hispanic America, amounting to some 375 million people.

Mexico is the country with the largest number of speakers (almost a quarter of all Spanish speakers in the world), although it is not the official language of the state. In 2003, Mexico also recognized the indigenous languages as national languages.

Mexico City, the city with the largest population of Spanish speakers in the world.

Buenos Aires, capital of Argentina, the largest Spanish-speaking country in the world by territorial extent.

Under one name or another, it is one of the official languages of Bolivia, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, the Dominican Republic and Venezuela. It has no recognition as an official language in other American countries where it is the spoken and majority language, as is the case of Argentina, Chile, Mexico and Uruguay. In Puerto Rico, the 1952 Constitution establishes Spanish together with English as official languages. In September 2015, Senate Bill 1177 was introduced to establish the use of Spanish in first place in the executive, legislative and judicial branches of the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico.

United States

Main article: Spanish language in the United States

Distribution of Spanish speakers in the United States in the 2010 Census.

The United States is the country with the second largest number of Spanish speakers in the world after Mexico, with a progressive advance of bilingualism, above all in the states of California, New Mexico and Texas, where there are official bilingual Spanish programs for residents coming from Hispanic America. Thus, for example, in California many government activities, documents and services are available in Spanish. Section 1632 of the California Civil Code recognizes the Spanish language as the language of the considerable and growing Hispanic community, which is why the Dymally–Alatorre Act institutes English-Spanish bilingualism, without necessarily excluding other languages. In the state of New Mexico, Spanish is used even in the state administration, although that state has no official language established in its constitution. The New Mexican Spanish spoken by native Spanish speakers of the state (not by recent immigrants) dates back to the times of the Spanish colonization in the 16th century and preserves numerous archaisms. The United States Commission on Civil Rights recognizes that in 1912:

"New Mexicans succeeded in protecting their heritage by inserting provisions in their constitution that make Spanish an official language equal to English".

In Texas, the government, through section 2054.116 of the Government Code, orders state agencies to provide the information on their websites in Spanish. Other states of the Union also recognize the importance of Castilian in their territory. In Florida, for example, its use is very widespread because of the presence of a large community of Cuban origin, mainly in the metropolitan area of Miami. Spanish has a long history in the United States; many states and geographic features bear names in that language, but the use of the Spanish language has increased above all because of immigration from the rest of America. One sign of the expansion of the language in the country is the large presence of Spanish-language media. Spanish is also especially concentrated in cosmopolitan cities such as New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Miami, Houston, Dallas, San Antonio, Denver, Baltimore, Portland and Seattle. Spanish is, moreover, the most widely taught language in the country.

The United States is the country with the second largest number of speakers of Judeo-Spanish or Ladino, after Israel. Specifically, it is estimated that some 300,000 people speak it. The tracking and counting of Sephardic communities both in the United States and in the rest of the world has improved notably since the Spanish law of 2015 that allows Sephardim who meet a series of requirements to apply for Spanish nationality.

Brazil

Main article: Spanish language in Brazil

Spanish has always been important in Brazil because of the proximity and growing trade with its Hispanic American neighbors, being a member of Mercosur, as well as because of the historical immigration of Spaniards and Hispanic Americans. In 2005, the National Congress of Brazil approved the decree, signed by the President, known as the Spanish Law, which offers this language as the first foreign language of instruction in the country's schools and high schools. Spanish is an easy language for Brazilians to learn, thanks to the fact that Portuguese is a language very similar to Spanish. In the border area between Brazil and Uruguay (mainly in Uruguay) a mixed language called Portuñol is spoken. The constitution of the state of Rio de Janeiro and a resolution of the government of the state of São Paulo officially include Spanish in secondary schools. Thus article 317.3 of the 1989 constitution of the State of Rio de Janeiro declares:

«The Spanish language becomes part of the compulsory core of subjects of all the grades of the second level of the state education network, taking primarily into account what the constitution of the Republic establishes in its fourth article, sole paragraph».

And article 2 of resolution no. 77 of 2008 of the state council of education of the government of the State of São Paulo recognizes:

«Spanish is a compulsory curricular component, according to the federal legislation in force, to be developed in accordance with the terms of the guidelines contained in indication CEE no. 77/08, which forms part of the resolution».

UNILA, a public university of the southern Brazilian region that coordinates and provides Castilian teachers to the state schools of Rio Grande do Sul, Santa Catarina and Paraná, made Spanish co-official. In recent years, because of the Venezuelan migration crisis, the Brazilian border state of Roraima has become the place with the most Spanish speakers in Brazil. It is estimated that around 50,000 Venezuelans currently reside in Roraima, which constitutes approximately 10% of the state's population. In 2005, the then Minister of Education, Fernando Haddad, and the then President of the Brazilian republic Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, signed Law no. 11,161, which became known as the "Lei do espanhol". According to its terms, its objective was to deal specifically with the teaching of Spanish in Brazil.

Canada

Main article: Spanish language in Canada

Distribution of the Spanish language in Canada

In Canada, the Spanish-speaking immigrant population accounts for 1.3%, and almost as many again speak it as a second language. Approximately half are concentrated in Toronto. Spanish ranks fourth among foreign languages with 553,495 native speakers, after Mandarin, Cantonese and Punjabi.

Other countries of Central America and the Caribbean

Spanish has no official recognition in the former British colony of Belize. Nevertheless, most of the population can speak Spanish, since it is a compulsory subject in schools. It is spoken mainly by the descendants of Hispanics who have inhabited the region since the 17th century. On the Caribbean island of Aruba, a large number of people speak it, it being the second most spoken language in Aruban homes according to data from the 2010 census. By contrast, in neighboring Curaçao and Bonaire a minority speaks it. Because of the proximity to Venezuela, Spanish-language media, mainly television channels, are received on the three islands, owing to the close commercial ties and the importance of Spanish-speaking tourism. In recent years, compulsory basic teaching of Castilian was also introduced in schools, although without official status (the only official languages of Aruba, Bonaire and Curaçao are Dutch and Papiamento: a mixture of Spanish and Afro-Portuguese).

Spanish is not an official language of Haiti. Although its official language is French, Haitian Creole (a language derived from French) is widely spoken. Near the border with the neighboring Dominican Republic, basic Spanish is understood and spoken colloquially. In regulated secondary studies, learning Spanish is compulsory from age 15 to 18. It is estimated that more than a million and a half Haitians can communicate in Spanish, without counting the diaspora.

In the United States Virgin Islands Spanish is spoken by approximately 17% of the population, coming above all from Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic. In Trinidad and Tobago, it enjoys a special status and is a compulsory subject in public schools. In Jamaica it is the most studied foreign language in secondary education from age 12 to 14. Other Caribbean islands have communities of Spanish speakers due to their proximity to the surrounding Spanish-speaking countries and the corresponding migrations from countries such as the Dominican Republic or Venezuela, which is why Spanish is taught as a second language in the education system of some of them.

Europe

Knowledge of Spanish in the European Union (able to hold a conversation) according to the 2006 Eurobarometer.
Native country
More than 9%
Between 4% and 8.99%
Between 1% and 3.99%
Less than 1%

Spain is the only place in Europe where the language is official; however, it is used beyond its borders, as in Gibraltar. In Andorra it is currently the second most spoken language, without being the traditional or official language, which is Catalan. Spanish is also used in small communities in other European countries, mainly in Portugal, France, Italy, the United Kingdom, Germany, Belgium and Switzerland (where it is the mother tongue of 1.7% of the population, representing the most spoken minority language in that country after three of the four official languages). Spanish is one of the official languages of the European Union (EU). Almost 23 million Europeans over the age of 12 speak Spanish outside Spain in the EU, counting those who have learned it as a foreign language and are able to hold a conversation. In total there would be some 70 million Spanish speakers in Europe.

In 2020, Russia incorporated Spanish as a foreign language in public education, for a total of 2 hours per week; this came after the Russian government made the study of a second foreign language compulsory. Since 2009, Russia has run the channel RT, which broadcasts news and reports entirely in Spanish.

Asia

Philippines

Main article: Spanish language in the Philippines

La Solidaridad

Early flag of the Filipino revolutionaries ("¡Viva la República de Filipinas!"). The first two constitutions were written in Spanish.

In the Philippines, once a Spanish overseas province, the Spanish language was official from 1571 to 1987, although from 1973 it had lost much representative weight at the official level. Presidential Proclamation 155 of March 15, 1973, still in force, declares Spanish an official language of the Philippines for all those documents of the colonial era not translated into the national language. After the Spanish–American War, the Philippines became a colony of the United States from 1899. From then on, because of the American intervention, the authorities pursued a policy of de-Hispanicization of the country and imposition of English. After the Philippine–American War, the Spanish-speaking urban bourgeoisie was decimated, and after the Second World War in 1945, the remains of the Spanish bourgeoisie were practically annihilated following the bombing of Intramuros in Manila. It has been calculated that in 1907 approximately 70% of the Filipino population was able to speak Spanish, although only 10% as a mother tongue. In 1950 the figure fell to 6%. At present it is less than 0.5%. Spanish-based creole languages also survive, such as Zamboanga Chavacano. In 2009, the then Filipino President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo was awarded the 2009 Don Quixote International Prize, which recognizes the educational initiative of the Republic of the Philippines to introduce Spanish into the national curricula; by the 2012–2013 school year Spanish was already the most studied foreign language after English, taught in 65 public schools.

At present, the Spanish language remains very present both in the given names and surnames of Filipinos (anthroponyms) and in the names of many of their localities (toponyms) and administrative divisions.

Israel

Main article: Spanish language in Israel

In Israel there is a large Sephardic community of approximately 1,400,000 people, many of whom still preserve the Judeo-Spanish language (or Ladino), the heritage of the Jews expelled from the Iberian kingdoms in the 15th and 16th centuries. In 2018 the National Academy of Judeo-Spanish was inaugurated in Jerusalem; it was incorporated in 2020 into the ASALE, with the aim of protecting, researching and promoting the use of Judeo-Spanish among the Sephardic communities and in general.

Another contribution to Spanish in that country has been the many Jewish immigrants from Latin America, and above all from Argentina, who have brought the typical Rioplatense accent to many areas of the country.

Other countries

There are other Asian countries where Spanish is being studied with great interest and is beginning to have importance in the educational, migratory and social spheres, the most frequently cited countries being Russia, China, Japan, Iran, India, the United Arab Emirates, Bangladesh and Kuwait. In Turkey, more specifically in the City of Istanbul, Judeo-Spanish Ladino is preserved.

Africa

Canary Islands

Spanish language in Africa and the Middle East.

Being part of Spain and therefore politically European, the main Spanish-speaking enclave in Africa is the Canary Islands (with more than two million speakers), followed by the autonomous cities of Ceuta and Melilla (with more than 168,000 speakers) and the other minor plazas de soberanía.

Equatorial Guinea

Spanish is one of the official languages of Equatorial Guinea. Equatorial Guinea obtained its independence from Spain in 1968, but maintains Spanish as an official language together with French and Portuguese, currently being the only African country where Spanish is an official language. It is also the most widely spoken language (considerably more than the other two official languages), mastered by 87.7% of the population according to the Instituto Cervantes. The great majority of Equatoguineans speak Spanish, although always as a second language, various Bantu languages being the most widespread mother tongues.

Western Sahara and Morocco

In Western Sahara, the Sahrawi minister for Latin America, Hash Ahmed, declared on behalf of the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic that his country is «simultaneously an African and Arab nation that has the privilege of being the only Spanish-speaking one owing to the cultural heritage of the Spanish colonization. The Spanish language is the compulsory language of instruction because, together with Arabic, it is an official language». Spanish is considered the second administrative and communication language of the SADR; the only official language in its constitution is Arabic. In Tindouf, Algeria, there are some 200,000 Sahrawi refugees who can read and write the Spanish language, and thousands of them received university education offered by Cuba, Mexico, Venezuela and Spain.

In Morocco the Spanish language is very popular as a second or third language. It is spoken mainly in the areas of the former Spanish protectorate in Morocco: the Rif, Ifni and Tarfaya. Haketia, the Moroccan variant of Judeo-Spanish, is also preserved in the north of the country.

Other countries

In addition, it is spoken by the Equatoguinean communities that fled during the dictatorships of Francisco Macías Nguema and Teodoro Obiang and who are now found in countries such as Gabon, Cameroon, Nigeria and Benin. In South Sudan there is also a significant minority, the intellectual and professional elite, trained in Cuba, who speak Spanish. Other places where Spanish has a presence are Angola, mainly in the city of Luena, and Walvis Bay, a city in Namibia, because of the presence of the Cuban army.

At the request of Equatorial Guinea, Spanish is a working language of the African Union, and through an amendment of Article 11 of the Constitutive Act of the African Union, Spanish has been included among the official languages "of the Union and all its institutions".

Rest of the world

Oceania

Percentage of Australians who speak Spanish at home, relative to the rest of the population according to the 2011 census.

Among the countries and territories of Oceania, Spanish is the de facto official language on Easter Island, in Polynesia, since it is part of Chile; the native language is Rapanui. In the Mariana Islands (Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands) Chamorro is the official and native language of the islands; it is an Austronesian language that contains vocabulary of Spanish origin. Some islands of the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands (Saipan, Tinian, Rota) and of the Federated States of Micronesia (Yap, Pohnpei) had native Spanish speakers, since they were Spanish colonies until 1898–1899. Nevertheless, both in Guam and in the Northern Marianas, a good part of their inhabitants have surnames of Spanish origin.

In addition, in Australia and New Zealand there are communities of native Spanish speakers, resulting from emigration from Spanish-speaking countries (mainly from the Southern Cone), totaling 133,000 speakers. In Hawaii, 2.1% of the population are native Spanish speakers. In 2010 there were 120,842 Hispanics, according to the United States census.

Antarctica

Orcadas Base, an Argentine scientific station, is the oldest Antarctic base in operation and the oldest with a permanent population (since 1907).

The Chilean settlement of Villa Las Estrellas for the civilian population at Presidente Eduardo Frei Montalva Base, located on the Fildes Peninsula of King George Island in the South Shetland Islands archipelago in Antarctica.

In Antarctica there are only two civilian settlements, and both are inhabited mainly by native Spanish speakers. One of them is the Argentine Fortín Sargento Cabral, which has 66 inhabitants. The other is the Chilean settlement of Villa Las Estrellas, which has a population of 150 inhabitants in summer and 80 inhabitants in winter. Each of them has a school where study and research are carried out in Spanish. Orcadas Base, an Argentine scientific station, is the oldest base in all of Antarctica still in operation and the oldest with a permanent population (since 1907).

Also worth noting is the role played by the various scientific bases in Antarctica belonging to Hispanic countries:

Country	Permanent bases	Summer bases	Total	Map
Argentina	6	7	13
Chile	4	5	9
Uruguay	1	1	2
Spain	0	2	2
Peru	0	1	1
Ecuador	0	1	1

Estimated total speakers by country

• The rows with a darker background color list the countries where Spanish is official. The estimate of total speakers refers to speakers of Spanish as a first and second language.
• The rows with a white background color list the countries where Spanish is not official, where Spanish is spoken as a mother tongue by the Hispanics who have emigrated there and by speakers of Spanish as a foreign language.

Pos.	Countries	Population		Native speakers of Spanish			Spanish speakers
		Population	Ref.	%	Speakers		%	With native proficiency		%	Total (including speakers with limited proficiency)
1	Mexico	130,118,356		93.8%	122,051,018		96.8%	125,954,569		99.2%	129,077,409
2	United States	328,239,523		13.5%	41,757,391		13.5%	41,757,391		17.2%	56,757,391
3	Colombia	51,049,498		99%	50,539,003		99.5%	50,794,251
4	Spain	47,353,590		92%	43,565,303		98%	46,406,518
5	Argentina	46,234,830		96.7%	44,709,081		98.1%	45,356,368		99.4%	45,957,421
6	Venezuela	32,605,423		96.3%	31,507,179		97.3%	31,725,077		98.8%	32,214,158
7	Peru	33,470,569		82.9%	27,747,102		86.6%	30,123,512
8	Chile	19,828,563		95.9%	19,015,592		95.9%	19,015,592		99.3%	19,689,763
9	Ecuador	17,424,000		93%	16,625,145		95.8%	17,125,687		98.1%	17,536,847
10	Guatemala	17,357,886		69.9%	12,133,162		78.3%	13,591,225		86.4%	14,997,214
11	Cuba	11,181,595		99.8%	11,159,232		99.8%	11,159,232
12	Bolivia	12,006,031		60.7%	7,287,661		83%	9,965,006		87.9%	10,553,301
13	Dominican Republic	10,621,938		97.6%	10,367,011		97.6%			98.6%	10,473,231
14	Honduras	9,526,440		97.8%	9,318,690		98.7%	9,402,596
15	France	67,407,241		0.7%	477,564		2.8%	1,910,258		9.9%	6,685,901
16	Paraguay	7,453,695		61.5%	4,584,022		68.2%	5,083,420		88.5%	6,596,520
17	Nicaragua	6,595,674		95.3%	6,285,677		97.1%	6,404,399
18	El Salvador	6,330,947		96.8%	6,090,000		99.7%	6,311,954
19	Brazil	214,085,000		0.2%	460,018		0.2%	460,018		2.8%	6,056,018
20	Italy	60,542,215		0.8%	513,543		1.7%	1,037,248		9.4%	5,704,863
21	Costa Rica	5,262,374		98.3%	5,176,956		99.3%	5,225,537
22	Panama	4,278,500		85.7%	3,777,457		91.9%	3,931,942
23	Uruguay	3,543,026		95.5%	3,392,826		98.4%	3,486,338
24	Puerto Rico	3,285,874		94.2%	3,095,293		99%	3,253,015
25	United Kingdom	67,081,000		0.3%	239,340		0.8%	518,480		4.6%	3,110,880
26	Philippines	109,991,095			8501		0.4%	438,882		2.74%	3,016,773
27	Germany	83,190,556		0.4%	300,670		0.8%	644,091		3.1%	2,576,366
28	Morocco	35,601,000		0.03%	11,342		0.03%	11,342		4.68%	1,664,823
29	Equatorial Guinea	1,505,588		13.7%	206,266		74%	1,114,135		87.7%	1,320,401
30	Romania	19,405,156					0.9%	182,467		4.7%	912,337
31	Canada	34,437,000		1.6%	553,495		1.9%	553,495		2.5%	846,495
32	Portugal	10,276,617		0.4%	41,353		3.1%	323,237		7.9%	808,091
33	Netherlands	17,261,622		0.5%	82,725		0.8%	133,719		3.9%	668,599
34	Ivory Coast	25,823,071								2.2%	566,178
35	Australia	25,585,000		0.5%	117,498		0.5%	117,498		1.9%	492,069
36	Sweden	10,323,857		0.8%	78,273		1%	101,472		4.5%	467,474
37	Belgium	11,515,793		0.6%	102,341		0.8%	89,395		3.9%	446,977
38	Benin	11,733,059								3.5%	412,515
39	Poland	38,386,000			3173		0.8%	324,137		0.8%	324,137
40	Austria	8,898,557		0.2%	20,320		0.8%	70,098		3.2%	280,393
41	Belize	430,191		52.1%	224,130		52.1%	224,130		62.8%	270,160
42	Algeria	43,378,027			782		0.4%	175,000		0.5%	223,422
43	Switzerland	8,586,550		2.3%	196,813		2.3%	200,714		2.5%	215,134
44	Senegal	16,209,125								1.3%	205,000
45	Cameroon	24,348,251			1377			1377		0.8%	194,095
46	Denmark	5,827,463		0.3%	16,062		0.8%	45,613		3.1%	182,450
47	Israel	9,138,000		1%	95,000		1%	95,000		1.9%	175,231
48	Japan	126,020,000		0.1%	108,000		0.1%	108,000		0.1%	168,000
49	Gabon	2,172,579								7.7%	167,410
50	Ireland	4,921,500			5325		2.9%	35,220		2.9%	140,880
51	Netherlands Antilles (Bonaire and Curaçao)	227,000			10,699		55.3%	125,534			140,670
52	Finland	5,527,573		0.1%	6474		0.1%	6474		2.4%	133,200
53	Bulgaria	7,000,039					1.9%	130,750		1.9%	130,750
54	Norway	5,356,789		0.5%	25,084		0.5%	25,084		2.1%	114,859
55	Russia	146,793,744			5872			5872		0.06%	90,175
56	Czech Republic	10,681,161			2495			2495		0.8%	90,124
57	Greece	10,724,599								0.8%	86,936
58	Hungary	9,772,756								0.9%	83,206
59	Aruba	112,309		12.2%	13,710		67.1%	75,402		74%	83,064
60	China	1,420,430,000			18,454			18,454			74,270
61	Trinidad and Tobago	1,363,985			4000			4100		5.2%	70,401
62	Guam (U.S.)	162,742			1201			1201		37.2%	60,582
63	New Zealand	4,957,000		0.4%	22,000		0.4%	22,000		1.2%	57,883
64	Slovenia	2,089,310					1.7%	35,194		1.7%	52,791
65	Andorra	78,264		43.2%	33,810		65.3%	51,106		65.3%	51,106
66	India	1,395,000,000			1000			1000			50,264
67	United Arab Emirates	9,575,729			47,300			47,300			48,000
68	Slovakia	5,450,017								0.8%	45,500
69	Gibraltar (UK)	29,441		77.3%	22,758		77.3%	22,758		100%	29,441
70	Lithuania	2,794,329								1.01%	28,297
71	Luxembourg	613,894		1%	6062		1.3%	8098		4%	24,294
72	Western Sahara	597,000									22,000
73	Turkey	83,815,489			5235			5235			20,235
74	Virgin Islands	106,405		15.78%	16,788		15.78%	16,788		15.78%	16,788
75	Latvia	1,908,100								0.7%	13,943
76	Cyprus	875,900								1.5%	13,208
77	Estonia	1,328,360								0.7%	9457
78	Madagascar	26,154,000									8200
79	Jamaica	2,726,667			8000			8000			8000
80	Moldova	2,618,000									6099
81	Tunisia	11,722,038									4904
82	Namibia	2,458,936						3870			3969
83	Egypt	99,963,200			4904			3500
84	Malta	493,559									3354
85	Falkland Islands (UK)	2,955			227			227			227
86	Vatican City				91			n.d.			n.d.
	Total	7,626,000,000 (Total world population)		6.2%	484,520,026		6.5%	506,375,556		7.2%	566,965,406

Countries by number of speakers:
More than 100 million
More than 50 million
More than 20 million
More than 10 million
More than 5 million
More than 1 million

An expanding language

Countries of the world where Spanish is studied.
Countries with Spanish as an official language
Countries with more than 1,000,000 students
Countries with more than 100,000 students
Countries with more than 20,000 students

For the year 2000, the forecast was that in the United States alone the number of Spanish speakers would reach 35,000,000. In that year Spanish overtook English as the most spoken language of the Western world. In 2001, Spanish speakers numbered approximately 400 million people.

The Instituto Cervantes, a body for the dissemination of Spanish, reported that between 1986 and 1990 there was a 70% increase in the number of students of Spanish in the United States and an 80% increase in Japan. The Spanish language is perhaps the third most studied foreign language in Japan. At present, Portuguese is the most studied foreign language, owing to the large Japanese-Brazilian community, with a total of 400,000 speakers. As such, the Portuguese language is currently part of the school curriculum in Japan. Other countries that stand out for their high increase in students are Brazil, Morocco, Sweden, Norway, Poland, Ivory Coast, Senegal, Cameroon and Gabon.

Nevertheless, there have also been setbacks in recent decades. The most notable case is that of the Philippines, a country in which the Spanish language went from being official to having a restricted role from 1973, and to definitively losing its official status in 1986; thus, after a process of replacement in favor of English and Tagalog, it went in very few decades from tens of millions of speakers in the Philippine archipelago to no more than 20,000 in 1990. The total number of speakers has been increasing very slightly in recent years because of the Filipino government's initiatives to reintroduce the language in education, but they are no longer native speakers.

Official academic sources calculate that by the year 2030 Spanish will be the second most spoken language in the world, behind Mandarin Chinese, and by 2045 it is expected to become the first.

Students of Spanish in the world

Instituto Cervantes in Madrid

Students of Spanish as a foreign language, according to the 2015 yearbook of the Instituto Cervantes. Only countries with more than 30,000 are shown.

Pos.	Countries	Students of Spanish (2017)
1	United States	8,157,386
2	Brazil	6,120,000
3	France	2,589,717
4	Italy	684,345
5	Ivory Coast	566,178
6	Germany	554,423
7	United Kingdom	519,660
8	Benin	412,515
9	Sweden	216,633
10	Senegal	205,000
11	Gabon	167,410
12	Spain	130,000
13	Equatorial Guinea	128,895
14	Portugal	126,541
15	Canada	92,853
16	Morocco	82,185
17	Norway	82,122
18	Poland	77,478
19	Cameroon	63,560
20	Japan	60,000
21	Netherlands	55,432
22	Austria	49,357
23	Belgium	46,388
24	Ireland	44,311
25	Bulgaria	41,674
26	Denmark	39,501
27	New Zealand	39,337
28	Tunisia	36,794
29	Czech Republic	35,576
30	Philippines	33,600
31	China	31,154
	Total in the world	21,815,280

Informal education

The data on people studying Spanish only cover centers certified by the Instituto Cervantes; however, because of new technologies, the way of studying has changed in all areas; applications on smartphones are a clear example of this.

On the web platform Duolingo, Spanish is the second most studied language in the world, with more than 36 million students. According to its 2020 report, Duolingo reported that Spanish had grown in popularity, displacing French as the second most studied language in the world, growing to become the most popular language in 34 countries and the second most popular in 70 countries. In 2016, Spanish was the most studied language in 32 countries and the second most studied in 57 countries.

Most studied languages on Duolingo (2020)

Language	English	Spanish	French
1st choice (no. of countries)	121	34	23
2nd choice (no. of countries)	8	70	71
Users (millions)	104.82	36.08	27.87

Note: Total users for each language, data updated to March 2021.

In 2020, out of a total of 19 languages available on Duolingo, English was studied by 53% of users, especially in regions such as Latin America, the Middle East and Southeast Asia. Spanish, with 17% of users, stands out in countries such as the United States, the United Kingdom and Norway, and at the regional level, in Anglo-America. From the English version, Spanish has 27 million users; that is equivalent to 80% of the total studying Spanish. It is followed by the Portuguese version with about 3 million users.

Dialectal varieties of Spanish

Map with the main varieties or dialects of the Spanish language in the world.

Dialects and accents of Spanish, together with other languages spoken in Spain, Andorra and Gibraltar.

The geographic varieties of Spanish, called dialects or geolects, differ from one another for a multitude of reasons. Among the phonetic ones, the most notable are whether or not the phonemes corresponding to the spellings c/z and s are distinguished (absence or presence of ceceo/seseo), whether or not the phonemes corresponding to the spellings ll and y are distinguished (absence or presence of yeísmo), whether or not s or z is aspirated before a consonant, and whether or not new consonants (such as /ʃ/) are adopted. These differences do not usually cause intelligibility problems among their speakers. The various varieties also differ in grammatical usage, such as voseo or the use or non-use of the informal second-person plural pronoun («vosotros»). In matters of vocabulary, notable differences occur especially in certain semantic fields, such as the naming of fruits and vegetables, clothing and everyday articles, as well as in colloquial or insulting expressions.

As in any language, especially when it is distributed over an extensive geographic domain, Spanish presents various internal varieties that allow its speakers to be distinguished by their pronunciation, their grammatical constructions and their vocabulary. In general terms, Spanish conventionally presents two types of modalities present both in Spain and in America: the conservative modalities, such as the Spanish of northern Spain, that of the interior of Colombia and Mexico or that of the Andes, and the innovative modalities, such as the Spanish of Andalusia and the Canary Islands, that of the Caribbean or that of the Río de la Plata. A typical feature of Peninsular Spanish is the division of the consonant cluster tl, which in words such as atlas or atletismo is pronounced ['at.las] and [at.le.'tis.mo], whereas in America the usual pronunciation is ['a.tlas] and [a.tle.'tis.mo].

Independently of these features, it is possible to distinguish large groups of dialectal varieties of Spanish. For example, for Moreno and Otero (2007) there would be eight: the Castilian, Andalusian and Canarian varieties in Spain, and the Caribbean, Mexican-Central American, Andean, Chilean and Rioplatense varieties in America.

The differences between the dialects are almost always limited solely to intonation, pronunciation and isolated words or expressions. One of the differences between the dialects of Spain and those of Hispanic America is the pronouns. In Spain, the only informal second-person pronoun used is «tú», but in some areas of Hispanic America such as Argentina, Uruguay or Paraguay «vos» is used. «Tú» and «vos» are informal and are used with friends. «Usted» is a form of respect used with strangers or older people. However, in certain regions of Colombia ustedeo can occur in settings of a certain informality comparable to the use of tuteo or voseo in the countries mentioned.

«Vos» is used as the second-person singular in many places in Hispanic America (see #Voseo).

The dialects of Spanish also vary with respect to the second-person plural. The dialects of America have only one form for the second-person plural: ustedes, which serves for both formal and informal situations. However, in European Spanish there are two: ustedes for formal situations and vosotros for informal situations.

Dialects in Spain
Northern dialects Aragonese Churro Of the Catalan-speaking areas and of Catalonia Of the Valencian Community Of Galicia Leonese Riojan Cantabrian Southern dialects Andalusian Eastern Andalusian Extremaduran or castúo Madrilenian Manchego Murcian
Dialects in Africa
Canarian Sahrawi Equatoguinean
Dialects in America
Amazonian Andean Northern Andean Rioplatense Uruguayan Rioplatense Cordobés Paraguayan Belizean Of eastern Bolivia Camba Vallegrandino or vallense Caribbean Venezuelan Colombian Coastal Barranquillero Cuban Dominican Panamanian Puerto Rican	Central American Costa Rican Guatemalan Honduran Nicaraguan Salvadoran Fraylescano Chilean Cuyano Chilote Of the interior and the Pacific of Colombia Bogotano or rolo Chocoano Cundiboyacense Llanero Paisa Pastuso Santandereano Tolimense or opita Vallecaucano or valluno Of Ecuador Coastal, Chocoano or Equatorial Spanish in the United States Louisiana Isleño Brule Isleño Adaeseño New Mexican Mexico Yucatecan Central Jalisciense Northern Of Peru Limeño Northern Peruvian Coastal Iquiteño Venezuela Maracaibero or marabino Llanero Andean or gocho Caraqueño or central Eastern or margariteño Central-Western or guaro
Dialects in Asia
Filipino

Derived languages

The following are languages that can be considered derived from Spanish, and creole languages with Spanish influence:

• Judeo-Spanish, Sephardic or Ladino, a language spoken by Sephardic Jews, and its Moroccan dialect, called Haketia;
• creole languages:
  • Chavacano, a creole language spoken in the Philippines and in parts of Insulindia —Zamboanga, Cavite, Semporna, Ternate and Tidore;
  • Papiamento, a creole language mixing Spanish, Portuguese and other languages, spoken in the southern Caribbean, with different variants: Aruban Papiamento, Bonaire Papiamento and Curaçao Papiamento;
  • Palenquero, a creole language spoken in Palenque de San Basilio (Colombia).

Languages relexified by Spanish

In the world there are several mixed languages and pidgins that take a large part of their vocabulary from Spanish:

• with English:
  • Spanglish, spoken in the United States;
  • Llanito, spoken in the British territory of Gibraltar;
• with Portuguese:
  • Portuñol, a mixed language spoken in the border areas between Brazil and the neighboring Hispanic American countries.
• with Guaraní:
  • Yopará, a speech with a strong influence and vocabulary coming from Spanish, spoken in Paraguay and northeastern Argentina;
• with Northern Quichua:
  • Media Lengua, a mixed language that has 89% Spanish vocabulary and Quichua grammar, spoken in Ecuador.

Linguistic description

Classification

Spanish is an Indo-European language of the Romance subfamily, specifically a language of the Ibero-Romance group, so the languages closest to it are Astur-Leonese, Galician-Portuguese and Aragonese. Typologically it is a fusional inflectional language, head-initial and dependent-marking, and its basic order is SVO (declarative sentences without topicalization).

Phonology and sounds

Main pages: Help:IPA/Spanish and Spanish phonology

Modern Spanish has a phonology notably different from that of Latin. In modern standard Spanish the opposition of length in vowels and consonants has been lost, and stress is not prosodically determined but is phonologically distinctive. In modern Spanish, voiceless sounds (without vibration of the vocal cords) are always obstruents (fricatives, affricates or stops), while voiced sounds are frequently continuants (approximants, sonorants or vowels). The only obstruent sounds that are voiced without this being due to assimilation are the stops /b, d, g/ (in absolute initial position or after a nasal). Medieval Spanish had voiced affricates and fricatives (still present in other Romance languages and even in Judaeo-Spanish, but systematically devoiced in modern standard Spanish).

In the transition from Latin to Spanish some distinctive changes can be observed, such as the presence of lenition (Latin vita – Spanish vida, Latin lupus – Spanish lobo), diphthongization in the phonetically short cases of E and O (Latin terra – Spanish – tierra, Latin novum – Spanish nuevo), and palatalization (Latin annum – Spanish año). Some of these features are also present in other Romance languages.

The most frequent phoneme in Spanish is /e/, which is why the letter «e» is also the most repeated letter in a long text in Spanish. The most frequent consonant phoneme in all varieties is /s/, although as a consonant letter «r» is slightly more frequent than «s» (this is because the phoneme /r/, when it is not at the beginning or end of a word, is written double, so that the frequency of that letter exceeds that of the phoneme. The frequency of «r» is increased even further because when it is found inside a word it represents the phoneme /ɾ/, the single tap).

Stress is of intensity, and statistically llanas words, or those stressed on the penultimate syllable, predominate, followed by agudas and finally esdrújulas. Thanks to the Royal Spanish Academy, founded in 1713, Spanish orthography has gradually been simplified in pursuit of the phonetic pattern, although this tendency came to a halt in the mid-19th century, despite the proposals along these lines by the grammarian Andrés Bello.

Vowels

Phonetic comparison between the vowels of English and Spanish (Bradlow, 1995), showing the first two formant frequencies.

In all varieties of Spanish there are five phonological vowels: /a e i o u/. /e/ and /o/ are mid vowels, neither close nor open, but they may tend to close or open as [e], [ɛ], [o] and [ɔ] depending on their position and on the consonants that check them. However, in most varieties these sounds are not a distinctive feature, unlike what happens in Catalan, Galician, Portuguese, French, Occitan and Italian; in Spanish these sounds are therefore allophones. Nevertheless, in the varieties of the southeast of the Iberian Peninsula (Eastern Andalusian and Murcian) the openness feature is phonological, and therefore these geolects have up to 10 vowels in opposition (singular [el 'pero] / plural [lɔ perɔ]).

According to Navarro Tomás, the vowel phonemes /a/, /e/ and /o/ have different allophones.

The vowels /e/ and /o/ have somewhat open allophones, very close to [ɛ] and [ɔ], in the following positions:

1. In contact with the double r sound ("rr") /r/, as in "perro", "torre", "remo", "roca".
2. When they precede the sound /x/, as in "teja", "hoja".
3. When they form part of a falling diphthong, as in "peine", "boina".
4. In addition, the open allophone of /o/ occurs in every syllable checked by a consonant, and the open allophone of /e/ appears when it is checked by any consonant other than /d/, /m/ and /n/: "pelma", "pesca", "pez", "costa", "olmo".

The phoneme /a/ has three allophonic varieties:

1. A palatal variety, when it precedes palatal consonants, as in "malla", "facha", "despacho".
2. Another, velarized variant occurs when it precedes the vowels /o/, /u/ or the consonants /l/, /x/: "ahora", "pausa", "palma", "maja".
3. A middle variant, which is realized in the environments not covered in the preceding paragraphs: "caro", "compás", "sultán".

Both /i/ and /u/ can also function as semivowels ([i^] and [u^]) in post-nuclear position in the syllable and as semiconsonants ([j̞] and [w̞]) in pre-nuclear position. Spanish has a pronounced anti-hiatus tendency that frequently turns hiatuses into diphthongs in relaxed pronunciation, as in héroe ['e.ɾo.e]-['e.ɾwe], or línea ['li.ne.a]-['li.nja].

In addition, in Spanish all vowels can be nasalized when checked by a nasal consonant, resulting in [ã], [ẽ], [ĩ], [õ] and [ũ]. This feature is more prominent in some linguistic varieties than in others.

In various dialects of Spanish in southeastern Spain, such as Eastern Andalusian and Murcian, among others, between 8 and 10 vowels are distinguished, and even 15 if the nasal vowels are counted, which are very present in these dialects; this phenomenon is sometimes accompanied by vowel harmony. Any vowel, when checked by a (silent) "s" or by the other (silent) consonants, results in the following vowels: /ɑ/, /ɛ/, /ɪ/, /ɔ/ and /ʊ/, thus forming the following vowel pairs: /a/-/ɑ/, /e/-/ɛ/, /i/-/ɪ/, /o/-/ɔ/ and /u/-/ʊ/. These vowel pairs are distinctive in these dialects, as in hasta and asta /ɑt̪a/ - ata (verb atar) /at̪a/, mes /mɛ/ - me /me/, los /lɔ/ - lo /lo/.

Unlike the above, the Spanish of Mexico pronounces unstressed vowels in a weak or voiceless way, mainly in contact with the sound /s/. It can thus happen that the words pesos, pesas and peces have the same pronunciation ['pesə̥s].

Consonants

All varieties of Spanish distinguish a minimum of 22 phonemes, five of which correspond to vowels (/a e i o u/) and 17 to consonants (/b s k d f g x l m n ɲ p r ɾ t ʧ ʝ/). Some varieties may have a larger number of phonemes; for example, in the Iberian Peninsula most dialects have the additional presence of /θ/, and among some speakers in various areas of Spain and America the phoneme /ʎ/ (which was present in Medieval Spanish) also persists. However, the number of sounds or allophones (which are not necessarily phonologically distinctive) is notably higher in all varieties of Spanish; for a list of some of them, see phonetic transcription of Spanish. The dialectal phonological differences, mostly due to differences in the consonants, are the following:

• No dialect of Spanish makes a spontaneous distinction between the pronunciation of the letters "b" and "v". This lack of distinction is known as betacism. However, it should be borne in mind that in some countries, particularly Chile, children are pressed hard at school to pronounce 'v' as a labiodental, so one may occasionally encounter this pronunciation (perceived by many as affected), especially in the media. The pronunciation of "v" as a bilabial stop or fricative phoneme, identical to that of "b", is also shared with Galician, Sardinian and several dialects of Catalan and Occitan, among others. One possible cause of this peculiarity is the influence of the Vasconic linguistic substratum, which would explain its spread in these languages from a Basque-Pyrenean focus. Another possible, rather structural, explanation is that although Latin had the letter 'v', which was in fact only a written variant of the semivowel 'u', it was pronounced /w/ and evolved in other Romance languages toward /v/. On the other hand, the fricativization of /b/, common to all Romance languages, gave rise to the allophones stop /b/ and fricative /β/. The latter bears a certain resemblance to the approximant /w/, so Latin 'v' [w] would have passed directly to [b, β] in Spanish. Nevertheless, the sound /v/ does exist in Spanish when an "f" is in contact with a voiced consonant; likewise, /s/ and /θ/ undergo voicing when in contact with a voiced consonant, becoming /z/ and /ð/, respectively. Example: Dafne ['davne], [roz'β̞iv ð̞e teɾ'neɾa].
• In general, there is confusion between consonantal "y", pronounced [ʝ], [ɟ], [ʒ] or [ʃ], and "ll", originally [ʎ], except in various areas of Spain (in decline) and, in America, in Paraguayan Spanish and in dialects with substrata of languages in which that difference exists, such as the bilingual Spanish-Quechua or Spanish-Aymara areas. This lack of distinction is known as yeísmo.
• In most varieties of America and southern Spain, /s/ is a laminoalveolar sound, while in other American varieties (most of Peru, Bolivia, scattered areas of Colombia, Mexico, Venezuela and the Dominican Republic) and in central and northern Spain, /s/ is apicodental [s̪].
• The representation of the consonant /ɲ/ by the letter "ñ" is considered a particular and singular feature of the Spanish language (coming from the Latin groups nn and niV, which in the Middle Ages began to be abbreviated as an "n" with a tilde (~) above it that later took on the wavy form representing its palatal pronunciation), although it also exists in many other languages of the world: Astur-Leonese, Aragonese, Breton and Galician; Guaraní, Mapudungun, Mixtec, Otomi and Quechua in America; Bube in Africa; or Chamorro in Oceania. In the Spanish of Yucatán the letter "ñ" is pronounced [nj] instead of [ɲ], and for that reason it is sometimes transcribed as "ni".
• The Spanish of Spain, except for the Canary Islands and much of Andalusia, distinguishes between [θ] (written 'z' or 'ce', 'ci') and [s]: casa ['kasa], caza ['kaθa].
• Most dialects show a more or less advanced loss of implosive /-s/ (postvocalic or in syllable coda), a phenomenon typical of the American 'lowlands', in a process similar to that of medieval French. The exceptions are Mexico (except for some coastal areas of the Caribbean), the northern half of Spain (where it is beginning to appear) and the Andean area (especially in Colombia, Ecuador, Peru and Bolivia).
• Due to the influence of Nahuatl, the Spanish of Mexico pronounces the digraphs "tz" and "tl" as affricate sounds: a voiceless alveolar affricate /t͡s/ and a voiceless alveolar lateral affricate /t͡ɬ/, respectively. The first of these appears only in native terms; the second is now applied to words that are not loanwords, such as Atlántico or Nestlé. Note that Atlántico and Nestlé are pronounced [a.'t͡ɬan.ti.ko] and [nes.'t͡ɬe] in Mexico, while in Spain they are pronounced [ad.'lan.ti.ko] and [nes.'le], respectively. On the other hand, since the letter "x" represents the sounds [ks], [gs], [s], [x] and [ʃ] in the Spanish of Mexico, there may be several pronunciations of the same word. For example, xenofobia is pronounced [seno'foβia], [ʃeno'foβia] or even [xeno'foβia]. This last pronunciation has been recorded in the speeches of several Mexican diplomats and writers, such as Adolfo López Mateos, Alfonso Reyes Ochoa and others. Likewise, xilocaína is pronounced [xiloka'ina], and xilófono may even be pronounced [si'lofono] or [ʃi'lofono].

Phonology of Spanish

The phonological system of Spanish is made up of a minimum of 17 consonant phonemes (and some varieties of Spain may have as many as 19 phonemes, as they also have the phonemes /ʎ/ and /θ/). As for vowels, most varieties have only 5 phonemes and several allophones. Some varieties of Andalusian and other southern dialects of Spanish may have up to 10 vowels in phonological opposition, since in them the ATR feature of openness can become relevant, doubling the number of vowels.

All these phonemes can be analyzed by means of a minimum of 9 binary features (for varieties without /θ/): [± consonant], [± sonorant]; [± dorsal], [± labial], [± coronal], [± palatal], [± velar]; [± continuant], [± nasal], [± lateral]. Normally, however, in order to make the description more natural, a few more are used, including some more explicit articulatory descriptions:

• For example, coronals are usually referred to as alveolars or dentals.
• Non-sonorant consonants are usually divided into stops if they have the feature [- continuant] and fricatives if they have the feature [+ continuant].

The table of consonants in terms of these features is given by:

FEATURES [+consonant]			[-dorsal]		[+dorsal]
			[+lab][-cor]	[-lab][+cor]	[+pal][-vel]	[-pal][+vel]
[-son]			p b	t d	tʃ	k g
		[+cont]	f	(θ) s	ʝ	x
[+son]	[+nas]		m	n	ɲ
	[-nas]	[+lat]		l	(ʎ)
		[-lat]		r ɾ

The phonemes that are not present in all varieties of Spanish have been indicated in parentheses (•).

Speed of pronunciation

A study carried out by the University of Lyon compared the following languages: German, Spanish, French, English, Italian, Japanese, Mandarin and Vietnamese. It concluded that only Japanese is able to surpass Spanish both in speed and in low density of information per pronounced syllable. The figures for the Spanish language were 7.82 syllables per second, compared with an average of 6.1 syllables in English in the same fraction of time, confirming that the speed of the language is due to adaptation to its structure.

Alphabet

The alphabet used by the Spanish language is the Latin alphabet, of which 27 letters are used: a, b, c, d, e, f, g, h, i, j, k, l, m, n, ñ, o, p, q, r, s, t, u, v, w, x, y, z.

In modern Spanish, «h» does not correspond to any phoneme (although in Old Castilian and some modern regional dialects it still represents the phoneme /h/). All varieties of Spanish have at least 22 phonemes (17 consonants and five vowels), with some varieties having up to 24 phonemes (two phonemes that appear in central and northern Iberian Spanish and do not appear in all varieties are /θ/ and /ʎ/). Furthermore, there is no exact correspondence between the rest of the letters and phonemes (for example, «c» = /k/ before /a, o, u/ and /θ/ before /e, i/ in Spain). Likewise, five digraphs are also used to represent as many phonemes: «ch», «ll», «rr», «gu» and «qu», the last two being considered positional variants for the phonemes /g/ and /k/.

The digraphs ch and ll were considered independent letters of the Spanish alphabet from 1754 to 2010, so both graphic signs were listed separately in dictionaries from 1803 to 1994, because they have their own pronunciation, distinct from that of the individual letters that compose them (c and l). Likewise, most Spanish speakers speak varieties that have yeísmo, under which the pronunciation of ll is identical to that of y when the latter is pronounced as a consonant, although its sound is traditionally considered a palatal lateral phoneme.

The letter «r» can represent the phoneme /ɾ/ (at the end or beginning of a word-internal syllable) or /r/ (word-initially, or after /-s/), as the following examples show:

dar ocas /'da'ɾokas/

da rocas /'da'rokas/

dar rocas /'daɾ'rokas/

Israel /isra'el/ (not /isɾa'el/)

The digraph «rr», on the other hand, always represents the phoneme /r/.

Grammar

Main article: Spanish grammar

Headquarters of the Royal Spanish Academy in Madrid, Spain

Spanish is an inflectional language of the fusional type; that is, in sentences inflection is preferentially used to indicate the relations between their elements. However, despite its character as an inflectional language, it also resorts to the use of prepositions, abstract words that serve as links and are invariable. Because of the way in which the arguments of transitive and intransitive verbs are marked, it is grouped among the nominative-accusative languages.

In the noun and the adjective, the categories of number and gender are obligatory, which is manifested both in the endings and in the form of the article required by a noun or adjective when it is preceded by an article. Personal pronouns distinguish the categories of number and case, and in the third person also gender. The verb systematically distinguishes between singular and plural forms, and also has forms according to tense, mood, aspect and voice.

Morphology

Spanish words are formed by means of lexemes or roots to which grammatical morphemes or grammemes are added (such as masculine or feminine gender and singular or plural number for nouns and adjectives, and mood, tense, voice, aspect and person and number for the verb), plus all kinds of affixes that serve to form derived words or to mark affectivity, as occurs with the especially abundant and characteristic derivation with diminutive suffixes, many of them used rather locally. Suffixation is used both for inflection and for derivation, while prefixation is always derivational, never inflectional. Inflection can also be carried out suprasegmentally by means of the position of the stress:

(yo) animo (1st p. sg pres ind)

(él) animó (3rd p. sg pret perf simp ind).

Syntax

Main article: Spanish grammar § Syntax

Syntax is the domain of sentences and their syntactic constituents, and it is concerned with studying the way in which the discrete elements of language combine with one another, as well as the restrictions of syntactic order, co-occurrence and agreement that exist between them. The most common basic order with verbs (other than unergatives) and with a definite subject and object is SVO, although pragmatically the order of these elements is quite free. Order restrictions affect almost exclusively clitics and negative polarity elements, and elements related to functional categories.

Compound sentences in Spanish include complex restrictions of the consecutio temporum and restrictions due to the distinction between an indicative mood and a subjunctive mood. The rules for choosing the mood of the subordinate clause are frequently not simple. In fact, this is one of the most difficult aspects for students of Spanish as a second language.

In addition, Spanish, like most Indo-European languages and unlike languages such as Chinese or Japanese, makes extensive use of various types of agreement in number, gender and polarity. These agreement relations frequently hold between different phrases. Typologically, Spanish is a head-initial language with few order restrictions regarding verbal arguments and syntactic adjuncts. Furthermore, Spanish is a language that preferentially uses dependent marking.

Voseo

Main article: Voseo

■ Majority use, in oral and written form
■ Shared use
■ Use restricted to specific areas
■ Spanish-speaking areas without voseo

In some varieties of American Spanish, the form vos is used as the second person singular pronoun instead of the standard tú; this variation is normally accompanied by a particular conjugation.

In the Spanish of the Peninsula, vos was at first a form of address proper only to nobles, or a form of respect similar to today's usted (vuestra merced). The emergence of the form vuestra merced, progressively contracted to usted, restructured the use of pronouns in Spain, so that vos began to be used as a form of address between equals and came into competition with tú. Over time, educated usage in Spain rejected vos, leaving usted as the form of respect and tú for familiar use or use between equals. The colonization of America at the end of the 16th century took place when vos was still used for address between equals, and with this value it became established in several areas as the popular form of address for the second person singular, but it lost its connotations of prestige. In Spain it does not survive today, although the second person plural form vosotros, which also has its origin in Latin vos, does. The educated urban centers of America that were most exposed to the influence of European Spanish followed the restructuring of pronouns of the Peninsula and reject vos in favor of tuteo (almost all of Mexico, the Antilles and Peru), while in the rest voseo has survived, with varying esteem, to the present day.

Voseo is markedly present in Argentina, Bolivia (east), Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Paraguay and Uruguay. It appears, in slightly different ways, in Venezuela (northwest), Colombia (west), and Chile. Less frequently and limited to the family sphere, "vos" can be found in Mexico (center and highlands of Chiapas), Colombia (Pacific coast), Ecuador (highlands), Chile (north and south) and in smaller areas of the interior of Mexico (Tabasco), Panama (Azuero Peninsula), Ecuador (south), Belize (south) and Peru (north and south). In Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic its use is extinct.

Only in the Rioplatense, Antioquian, Camba and Central American spheres is it regularly used as a prestigious form; in other regions there is a certain diglossia between the two conjugations.

Example of voseo on a sign in Buenos Aires, Argentina, which reads ¿Querés cambiar? Vení a Claro. The Rioplatense dialect is the most representative of voseo in the Spanish language.

In Argentina, Paraguay and Uruguay, «vos» has even almost completely displaced «tú» from written sources. Nevertheless, there are Rioplatense writers who still keep the classical form «tú» in their works of fiction, such as the Uruguayan poet Mario Benedetti.

In Guatemala, tuteo is used more frequently between people of different sexes; when a man speaks to a woman he does not know, the form of address is generally «tú», and when there is more familiarity, vos is used.

In El Salvador tuteo is common; it is used as courtesy or respect in certain registers, for example, when speaking with foreigners, when speaking in public, in advertising, correspondence, etc. If the situation is spontaneous, both are usually used. It is normal between equals, and mostly among the lower class, unlike voseo, which is normal among the middle and upper classes.

In Nicaragua the use of «tú» is extinct; the whole population uses «vos» for informal situations and «usted» for formal ones. Anyone who uses tú is considered a foreigner, or someone imitating another culture; the use of «tú» or its conjugation in some phrases or sentences stems from the many Hispanic American telenovelas in which tuteo is common.

In Costa Rica, vos is very common as an informal pronoun, while «usted» is the formal pronoun. There are speakers who use «usted» exclusively, regardless of whether the use is formal or informal. There are also speakers who use tuteo, but this usage is rejected by speakers who use vos.

In Venezuela, voseo is common in Zulia State and in the central-western part of Falcón State.

Lexicon

Main article: Spanish lexicon

The lexicon of Spanish is made up of around 70% words derived from Latin, 10% derived from Greek, 8% from Arabic, 3% from Gothic, and 9% words derived from various other languages.

From the pre-Roman languages of the Peninsula (Iberian, Basque, Celtic or Tartessian) there are a good many place names, some words (barro, perro, cama, gordo, nava) and the occasional isolated anthroponym, such as Indalecio. The settlement of Germanic peoples such as the Visigoths, the Vandals or the Suebi introduced quite a few given names (Enrique, Gonzalo, Rodrigo) and their respective surnames (Enríquez, González, Rodríguez), the suffix -engo in words such as «realengo», and vocabulary relating to war such as «yelmo» and «espía».

In addition, the aforementioned Muslim period gave way to the adoption of numerous Arabisms. In morphology, it is worth noting that the suffix -í of demonyms such as «ceutí» or «israelí» comes from Arabic.

In the 16th century numerous Italianisms relating to the arts were introduced, but also a large number of indigenous words or Americanisms, referring to plants, customs or natural phenomena proper to those lands, such as batata, papa, yuca, cacique, hamaca, huracán, cacao, chocolate, coming from Nahuatl, the Mayan languages, the Arawakan languages (primarily Taíno) and Quechua. In the 17th century numerous learned words entered through the influence of the Gongorine or culterano language. In the 18th century came Gallicisms, or words taken from French, referring above all to fashion, cooking and bureaucracy, such as puré, tisú, menú, peluquín, maniquí, restorán/restaurante, buró, carné, gala and bricolaje, among others. In the 19th century new loanwords were incorporated, above all from English and German, but also from Italian in fields relating to music, in particular opera (batuta, soprano, piano, radio), and cooking. In the 20th century the pressure of English increased enormously in the fields of technology, computing, science and sport: set, penalti, fútbol, e-mail, Internet, software. All of these are known as linguistic loans.

However, the Royal Spanish Academy has made great efforts in recent years to avoid the use of these words by proposing alternatives more in keeping with the traditional orthography of Spanish (among many other examples: zum instead of zoom, correo electrónico instead of e-mail, fútbol instead of football…). Although most of these initiatives have gradually caught on in society, certain proposals have not been very well received, despite being recommended by the RAE.

In general, America is more susceptible to loans from English, or Anglicisms ("mouse", in Spain: "ratón"), due in large part to closer contact with the United States. For its part, Spain is more susceptible to Gallicisms, or words taken from neighboring France (such as the Gallicism "ordenador" in the Spanish of the Iberian Peninsula, in contrast with the Anglicism "computadora" or "computador" in American Spanish).

As for the Slavic languages, most of the loans come from the Russian language. Nevertheless, there are also words in Spanish that come from Czech and Slovak. Most of the loans from Czech were assimilated into Spanish through other languages, such as French and English, with a Czech origin, such as pistola or robot. Nevertheless, most of the words coming from Czech are eponymous nouns.

Writing system

Main article: Spanish orthography

The letter eñe on a keyboard.

Spanish is written using a variant of the Latin alphabet with the additional letter «ñ» (eñe) and the digraphs «gu», «qu», «rr», «ch» and «ll», the last two of which were considered letters of the alphabet from 1754 to 2010, and which were listed separately from «c» and «l» between 1803 (fourth edition of the DRAE) and 1994, because they represent a single sound, distinct from the letters that compose it.

Thus, the Spanish alphabet consists of twenty-seven letters: «a», «b», «c», «d», «e», «f», «g», «h», «i», «j», «k», «l», «m», «n», «ñ», «o», «p», «q», «r», «s», «t», «u», «v», «w», «x», «y» and «z».

The digraphs «ch» and «ll» have specific phonetic values, which is why in the Ortografía de la lengua española of 1754 they began to be considered letters of the Spanish alphabet, and from the publication of the fourth edition of the Dictionary of the Spanish Language in 1803 they were ordered separately from «c» and «l». It was during the 10th Congress of the Association of Academies of the Spanish Language, held in Madrid in 1994, and on the recommendation of several bodies, that it was agreed to reorder the digraphs «ch» and «ll» in the place that the universal Latin alphabet assigns to them, although they still formed part of the alphabet. With the publication of the Ortografía de la lengua española of 2010, both ceased to be considered letters of the alphabet.

Furthermore, unlike other languages in the rest of the world, Spanish is the only language that uses opening question and exclamation marks that other languages do not have («¿» and «¡»), which are placed at the beginning of the question or exclamation, with their respective closing counterparts («?» and «!») at the end of the question or exclamation. In this way Spanish can be distinguished from other languages with regard to the formation of questions and exclamations (note that these opening marks were introduced in the second edition of the Orthography of the Royal Academy of the Language). These special marks make it easier to read long questions and exclamations that orally are expressed only by variations in intonation. In other languages «¿» and «¡» are not necessary because their oral syntax causes no ambiguity when read, since there is subject inversion, special auxiliaries, set phrases ―for example: Is he coming tomorrow?, Vient-il demain?, Kommt er morgen?, ¿Viene mañana?―.

Vowels always constitute the center or nucleus of the syllable, although «i» and «u» can function as semiconsonants before another vowel nucleus and as semivowels after one. A vowel nucleus of a syllable may sound stronger and louder than the remaining syllable nuclei of the word if it bears the so-called stress accent, which is written, according to certain orthographic rules, with the sign called the written accent or tilde to mark the stress when it does not follow the usual pattern, or to distinguish words that are spelled the same (see diacritical accent).

In addition, the letter «u» can bear a diaeresis («ü») to indicate that it is pronounced in the groups «güe» and «güi». In poetry, the vowels «i» and «u» can also bear a diaeresis to break a diphthong and conveniently adjust the meter of a given verse (for example, «ruido» has two syllables, but «ruïdo» has three). Spanish is a language with a marked anti-hiatus tendency, so in relaxed speech hiatuses are usually reduced to diphthongs, and these are even reduced to a single vowel: indoeuropeo > *indouropeo > *induropeo; ahora > *ahura > *ara; héroe > *herue.

Other representations

• Spanish Braille

Economic value of the language in Spain

A study by the private foundation La Voz Libre suggests that the economic value of the Spanish language in Spain stands at 15.6% of the country's GDP. At present, three and a half million people hold jobs directly related to Spanish, one million more than in the previous decade. Furthermore, sharing the Spanish language explains why Spain's trade exchanges with Ibero-America, in particular, are multiplied by 2.5. Sharing Spanish increases bilateral trade between Spanish-speaking countries by 290%.

Other factors of economic value are the teaching of the language itself, the cultural industry, publishing, gastronomy, science, architecture, sport and tourism.

According to the Instituto Cervantes, the number of language tourists arriving in Spain grew by 137.6% from 2000 to 2007. And the Spanish tourism sector puts the revenue from language tourism in Spain in 2007 at 462.5 million euros. The 237 600 students who came to Spain that year spent 176.5 million on Spanish courses, of which 86% went to private language schools and the remaining percentage to universities.

The Royal Spanish Academy and the associated academies

Main articles: Royal Spanish Academy and Association of Academies of the Spanish Language

Member countries of the ASALE.

Facade of the Colombian Academy of Language (ACL) in Bogotá.

Palacio de las Academias, headquarters of the Venezuelan Academy of Language (AVL) in Caracas.

Casa de Osambela, headquarters of the Peruvian Academy of Language (APL) in Lima.

Casa Dueñas, headquarters of the Salvadoran Academy of Language (ASL) in San Salvador.

The Royal Spanish Academy (RAE) and the other Academies of the Spanish Language together form the Association of Academies of the Spanish Language (ASALE), which declares its purpose to be to promote the unity, integrity and development of the Spanish language. As regulatory bodies, they work to disseminate the rules of prescriptive usage of the language and to recommend their application in the spoken and written language. These norms have been set out in several works of grammar, orthography and lexicography, in particular the Ortografía de la lengua española (1999), the Diccionario panhispánico de dudas (2005), the Nueva gramática de la lengua española (2009) and the Diccionario de la lengua española, with 23 editions published between 1780 and 2014 (the last having been revised in 2017⁹ and updated in 2018¹⁰ with the designation electronic version 23.2).

ASALE currently comprises 24 academies, all in countries where Spanish is an official or de facto vehicular language, plus the United States and Israel. The case of Israel is atypical, as it is not a country with a Spanish-speaking majority, but rather where the institutions that preserve, research and promote the use of Judaeo-Spanish are located, and they are therefore not subject to the application of the current norms of the Spanish language. To that end, the National Academy of Judaeo-Spanish was established in 2018, being the last to join ASALE (in 2020).

To date, there are no Academies of the Spanish Language in other territories that have an intense historical, and above all linguistic, connection with Spain (such as Andorra, Western Sahara or Belize), so the Royal Spanish Academy maintains the tradition of appointing corresponding academicians from among recognized figures in the field of the Spanish language in those territories.

Country	Academy	Founded
Spain	Royal Spanish Academy	1713
Colombia	Colombian Academy of Language	1871
Ecuador	Ecuadorian Academy of Language	1874
Mexico	Mexican Academy of Language	1875
El Salvador	Salvadoran Academy of Language	1875
Venezuela	Venezuelan Academy of Language	1883
Chile	Chilean Academy of Language	1885
Peru	Peruvian Academy of Language	1887
Guatemala	Guatemalan Academy of Language	1887
Costa Rica	Costa Rican Academy of Language	1923
Philippines	Philippine Academy of the Spanish Language	1924
Panama	Panamanian Academy of Language	1926
Cuba	Cuban Academy of Language	1926
Paraguay	Paraguayan Academy of the Spanish Language	1927
Bolivia	Bolivian Academy of Language	1927
Dominican Republic	Dominican Academy of Language	1927
Nicaragua	Nicaraguan Academy of Language	1928
Argentina	Argentine Academy of Letters	1931
Uruguay	National Academy of Letters of Uruguay	1943
Honduras	Honduran Academy of Language	1948
Puerto Rico	Puerto Rican Academy of the Spanish Language	1955
United States	North American Academy of the Spanish Language	1973 (*1980)
Equatorial Guinea	Equatoguinean Academy of the Spanish Language	2013 (*2016)
Israel	National Academy of Judaeo-Spanish	2018 (*2020)

^{* Date of recognition and integration into ASALE}

Other associations related to the Spanish language around the world

Country	Association	Founded	Members	Website
Germany	German Association of Hispanists	1977	436	[9]
Brazil	Brazilian Association of Hispanists	2000	326	[10]
Cameroon	Cameroonian Association of Hispanists	1994
Canada	Canadian Association of Hispanists	1964		[11]
South Korea	Korean Association of Hispanists	1981		[12]
Egypt	Association of Hispanists of Egypt	1968
Israel	Association of Hispanists of Israel	2007		[13]
Morocco	Association of Moroccan Writers in the Spanish Language	1997
	Association of Hispanists of Morocco	1989
Russia	Association of Hispanists of Russia	1994		[14]
Western Sahara	Union of Sahrawi Journalists and Writers	2005
Serbia	Association of Hispanists of Serbia	2008

See also

• List of standard vocabulary differences between Spanish-speaking countries
• List of countries where Spanish is an official language
• Spanish sound change "f → h"
• Readjustment of the sibilants of the Spanish language
• Neutral Spanish
• Spanish of America
• Hispanidad
• International Congress of the Spanish Language
• International Congress on the History of the Spanish Language
• Hispanopedia:Frequently asked language questions
• Literature in Spanish
• Yeísmo

Bibliography

• Alatorre, Antonio: Los 1001 años de la lengua española. Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Económica. ISBN 968166678X.
• Cano, Rafael (coord.): Historia de la lengua castellana. Barcelona: Ariel Lingüística, 2005.
• Holtus, Günter; Michael Metzeltin, Christian Schmitt (eds.): Lexikon der Romanistischen Linguistik (LRL), Tübingen, Niemeyer, 1988-2005 (12 Bände); Band VI,1: Aragonesisch/Navarresisch, Spanisch, Asturianisch/Leonesisch. Aragonés/Navarro, Español, Asturiano/Leonés, 1992.
• López García, Ángel: El rumor de los desarraigados: conflicto de lenguas en la Península Ibérica. Barcelona: Anagrama (13th Anagrama Prize), 1985.
• Metzeltin, Michael: Gramática explicativa de la lengua castellana. De la sintaxis a la semántica., Wien, Praesens Verlag, 2009.
• Ulašin, Bohdan (2011). "Eslovaquismos y bohemismos en español". Eslavística Complutense (in español). 11. ISSN 1578-1763. Retrieved May 16, 2016.
• Wolf, Heinz-Jürgen and Stefan Ruhstaller: Las Glosas Emilianenses. Seville: Universidad de Sevilla, 1996.

External links

Organizations

• Real Academia Española - Spanish institution specializing in lexicography, grammar, orthography and linguistic databases. Producer of the reference dictionary of the Spanish language.
• Instituto Cervantes - The Instituto Cervantes is the public institution created by Spain in 1991 to promote universally the teaching, study and use of Spanish and to contribute to the spread of Hispanic cultures abroad.
• Association of Academies of the Spanish Language - Since its creation in 1951, the purpose of ASALE has been to work in favor of the unity, integrity and growth of the Spanish language, which constitutes the richest common heritage of the Spanish-speaking community.

Dictionaries

• University of León (dictionaries of varieties of Spanish) - UniLeon.es
• Real Academia Española (translator into Spanish) - oesi.cervantes.es
• Superespanol.com - Visual dictionary with audio
• Diccionario del español de México, published by the center of the same name belonging to El Colegio de México, under the direction of Luis Fernando Lara Ramos.

Courses and educational resources

• Isogloss maps of phonetic variants of Spanish in the Iberian Peninsula, at JotaMartin.ByetHost33.com.
• Dialect map of Spanish in the Iberian Peninsula, at JotaMartin.ByetHost33.com.
• Superespanol. com - Basic Spanish course with audio
• Maps of the Pronunciation of Spanish.
• BVFE | Biblioteca Virtual de la Filología Española. Director: Manuel Alvar Ezquerra. Bibliographic directory of dictionaries, grammars, orthography, orthoepy, prosody, metrics, dialogues, etc.

Articles and monographs

• CVC.Cervantes.es Yearbook El español en el mundo.
• Serrat Viñas, Juan (Valladolid, 2001). "El idioma español en el mundo de los negocios mundial" (in español). Instituto Cervantes. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
• ElCastellano.org: General information page on Spanish.
• Ethnologue.org: General information page on Spanish (in English).
• UIowa.edu («The sounds of Spanish», from the University of Iowa).
• Current affairs of Spanish in the world, at UnidadEnLaDiversidad.com.
• Ángel Alonso-Cortés and Francisco Cabrillo, «La economía del español», Revista de Libros, 146, February 2009.
• Idioma y poder: el caso del español
• Las lenguas románicas estándar. Historia de su formación y de su uso, Academia de la Llingua Asturiana, Oviedo, 2004
• Ethnologue.com Table of languages by number of inhabitants*
• Languages similar to Spanish