The spanish language

1. The Spanish Language
By Mark Little.
THE STORY OF SPANISH - THE LANGUAGES OF IBERIA - FAVORITE FALSE FRIENDS - FAVORITE PROVERBS
"Limpia, fija y da esplendor" ("Cleans, fixes and gives shine") sounds like an advertisement for car wax, but in fact it is the
motto of Spain’s Royal Language Academy, whose function it is to ensure the purity of the Spanish language. The academy
was established in 1713, after the French model, and its 46 members include scholars, writers and journalists - the post is for
life, but unremunerated - who occupy seats identified by a letter of the alphabet (both in upper and lower case, so there is room
for everybody). The members meet regularly to discuss whether capital letters should be accented (yes) or whether such
imports as "fútbol", "trailer", "internet", "ketchup" or "crack" are worthy enough to be included among the 83,500 words in the
official Spanish dictionary (yes to the first two; not yet for the others).
Spanish ("español", also referred to as "castellano", Castillian) is, like French, Portuguese, Italian, a Romance language,
derived from Latin.
Unlike English, Spanish is a phonetic language. Words are pronounced exactly as they are spelt, which is why it is somewhat
harder for Spaniards to learn English than viceversa. The main stumbling block for students are the Spanish verb tenses,
especially the subjunctive. Spanish also distinguishes masculine and femine gender. There is no neutral gender so objects and
concepts too are either masculine or feminine.
Following the discovery of America, Spaniards took their language with them to the four corners of the globe. Today, Spanish
is spoken by more than 250 million people in north, south and central America and parts of Africa.
In Spain itself, while Spanish is the first official language, it coexists with a number of regional languages including Basque,
Gallego and Catalan. The defense of local languages against the dominance of Castillian has always been a politically-charged
issue in Spain.
THE STORY OF SPANISH
Spanish is a Romance language. That is, like French and Italian, it is descended from the vulgar Latin spoken by soldiers and
shopkeepers in the days of the Roman Empire. Gradually, the way people spoke Latin in the different parts of the Empire took
on peculiar traits, becoming dialects of Latin and, eventually, languages in their own right, coexisting with the classical Latin
spoken by scholars and the clergy.
Spanish is the particular dialect which arose in the region of Castile. The language spread to other parts of Spain apace with
Castillian conquests, and overwhelmed other local dialects. The first written records in Castillian date from the 11th century:
called "jarchas", they are small snippets of Romance which Moorish poets incorporated into their work. The first major
instance of literary Spanish is the Song of Mio Cid, an oral epic poem first committed to writing by an anonymous troubadour
in the 12th century.
A distinctive feature of Spanish is the large number of Arabic words it incorporated during the centuries-long Moorish
presence in Spain. In fact, the Moors were not Arabs, but a racial mix of a small number of Arabs (mainly Syrians) and greater
numbers of Berbers and descendents of the Ibero-Romans who had lived in Spain before the Muslim invasion. For much of the
Moorish period Romance was the lingua franca in both Christian and Muslim Spain.
Language continually evolves. During the 17th century, Spanish underwent a significant - and very rapid - change in
pronunciation. For instance the letter X, as in Don Quixote, was originally pronounced as "sh" . Afterwards, it was pronounced
with the harsh "h" sound - like clearing your throat - used today, and in writing it came to be spelt J. The initial F in many
words, such as "hijo" (son) was dropped, and in writing was replaced by the silent H. The modern pronunciation of Z, as a hard
"th", also dates from this time.
You can still get an idea of how Spanish was spoken when Columbus sailed for America by listening to a speaker of Ladino.
This is a variant of Spanish spoken by Sephardic Jews, and contains many traits of the language as it was when the Jews were
expelled from Spain at the end of the 15th century.
THE LANGUAGES OF IBERIA
Spanish coexists with other languages spoken in different regions of the Iberian peninsula.
Catalan and Gallego, like Spanish, are Romance languages. They are not dialects of Spanish, having evolved directly from
Latin. Both have significant bodies of written literature.
Catalan, the language of the Catalonia region of north-eastern Spain, is more closely related to the Occitan language of
southern France than to Spanish. Gallego, spoken in north-western Spain, is similar to Portuguese. Unlike Catalan or
Portuguese, Gallego is easy for Spanish speakers to understand both in its spoken and written form.
Valenciano, Mallorquín and Aragonese are usually considered dialects of Catalan by everyone except people in Valencia,
Mallorca and Aragon, who feel that a dialect is somehow a sign of second class citizenship, and therefore prefer to regard the

2. local speech as fully fledged languages. Another Romance language, Bable, was widespread in northern Spain in the middle
ages, but today is spoken only in pockets of the Asturian mountains in northern Spain.
Basque, or Euskera, is a different case altogether. Not only isn't it a Romance language, it is not even related to Indo-European.
Basque is one of the oldest languages in Europe, but has always been an eminently oral one, lacking a significant body of
literature. The irregular terrain of the Basque Country, encompassing parts of northern Spain and south-western France, gave
rise to up to eight different dialects of Basque. The promotion of a standardized Basque language was one of the key issues for
the Basque nationalist movement born at the end of the 19th century, but with Franco's repression of regional languages during
his regime Basque became restricted principally to rural areas. Franco's policy also extended to Catalan, whose use in public
was prohibited.
The arrival of modern democracy to Spain in the 1970s and the rise of autonomous rule in the different regions led to a revival
of local languages, especially in the Basque Country and Catalonia.