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 "Spanish
(Spanish:
español) is a
Romance language
named for its origins as the native tongue of a large proportion of the
inhabitants of
Spain.
It is also named
Castilian (Spanish:
castellano...
after the Spanish region of
Castile
where it originated. Spanish is the
second most natively spoken
language in the world, after
Mandarin Chinese.
In 1999 there were, according to
Ethnologue,
358 million people speaking Spanish as a
native language
and a total of 417 million speakers worldwide. Currently these figures are
up to 400 and 500 million people respectively.
Mexico
contains the largest population of
Spanish speakers.
Spanish is one of the
six official languages
of the
United Nations,
and is used as an
official language
by the
European Union
and
Mercosur.
Spanish is a part of the
Ibero-Romance group
that evolved from several dialects of
spoken Latin
in central-northern
Iberia
around the ninth century and gradually spread with the expansion of the
Kingdom of Castile
(present northern
Spain)
into central and southern Iberia during the
later Middle Ages.
Early in its history, the Spanish vocabulary was enriched by its contact
with
Basque
and
Arabic,
and the language continues to adopt foreign words from a variety of other
languages, as well as developing new words. Spanish was taken most notably
to America
as well as
to Africa
and
Asia-Pacific
with the expansion of the
Spanish Empire
between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries, where it became the most
important language for government and trade."
Source:
Wikipedia |
