Spanish language


Spanish or Castilian is a Romance language of the Indo-European language family that evolved from the Vulgar Latin spoken on the Iberian Peninsula of Europe. It originated in the Kingdom of Castile, a historical kingdom in north-central Spain. Today, it is a global language with 519 million native speakers, mainly in the Americas and Spain, and about 636 million speakers total, including second-language speakers. Spanish is the official language of 20 countries, as well as one of the six official languages of the United Nations. Spanish is the world's second-most spoken native language after Mandarin Chinese; the world's fourth-most spoken language overall after English, Mandarin Chinese, and Hindustani ; and the world's most widely spoken Romance language. The country with the largest population of native speakers is Mexico.
Spanish is part of the Ibero-Romance language group, in which the language is also known as Castilian. The group evolved from several dialects of Vulgar Latin in Iberia after the collapse of the Western Roman Empire in the 5th century. The oldest Latin texts with traces of Spanish come from mid-northern Iberia in the 9th century, and the first systematic written use of the language happened in Toledo, a prominent city of the Kingdom of Castile, in the 13th century. Spanish colonialism in the early modern period spurred the introduction of the language to overseas locations, most notably to the Americas.
As a Romance language, Spanish is a descendant of Latin. Around 75% of modern Spanish vocabulary is Latin in origin, including Latin borrowings from Ancient Greek. Alongside English and French, it is also one of the most taught foreign languages throughout the world. Spanish is well represented in the humanities and social sciences. Spanish is also the third most used language on the internet by number of users after English and Chinese and the second most used language by number of websites after English.
Spanish is used as an official language by many international organizations, including the United Nations, European Union, Organization of American States, Union of South American Nations, Community of Latin American and Caribbean States, African Union, and others.

Name of the language and etymology

Name of the language

In Spain and some other parts of the Spanish-speaking world, Spanish is called not only wikt:español#Spanish but also wikt:castellano#Spanish, the language from the Kingdom of Castile, contrasting it with other languages spoken in Spain such as Galician, Basque, Asturian, Catalan/Valencian, Aragonese, Occitan and other minor languages.
The Spanish Constitution of 1978 uses the term castellano to define the official language of the whole of Spain, in contrast to las demás lenguas españolas. Article III reads as follows:
The Royal Spanish Academy, on the other hand, currently uses the term español in its publications. However, from 1713 to 1923, it called the language castellano.
The Diccionario panhispánico de dudas states that, although the Royal Spanish Academy prefers to use the term español in its publications when referring to the Spanish language, both terms—español and castellano—are regarded as synonymous and equally valid.

Etymology

The term castellano is related to Castile, the kingdom where the language was originally spoken. The name Castile, in turn, is usually assumed to be derived from castillo.
In the Middle Ages, the language spoken in Castile was generically referred to as Romance and later also as Lengua vulgar. Later in the period, it gained geographical specification as Romance castellano, lenguaje de Castiella, and ultimately simply as castellano.
Different etymologies have been suggested for the term español. According to the Royal Spanish Academy, español derives from the Occitan word espaignol and that, in turn, derives from the Vulgar Latin *hispaniolus. Hispania was the Roman name for the entire Iberian Peninsula.
There are other hypotheses apart from the one suggested by the Royal Spanish Academy. Spanish philologist Ramón Menéndez Pidal suggested that the classic hispanus or hispanicus took the suffix -one from Vulgar Latin, as happened with other words such as bretón or sajón.

History

Like the other Romance languages, the Spanish language evolved from Vulgar Latin, which was brought to the Iberian Peninsula by the Romans during the Second Punic War, beginning in 210 BC. Several pre-Roman languages —some distantly related to Latin as Indo-European languages, and some that are not related at all—were previously spoken in the Iberian Peninsula. These languages included Proto-Basque, Iberian, Lusitanian, Celtiberian and Gallaecian.
The first documents to show traces of what is today regarded as the precursor of modern Spanish are from the 9th century. Throughout the Middle Ages and into the modern era, the most important influences on the Spanish lexicon came from neighboring Romance languages—Mozarabic, Navarro-Aragonese, Leonese, Catalan/Valencian, Portuguese, Galician, Occitan, and later, French and Italian. Spanish also borrowed a considerable number of words from Andalusi Arabic, and a few from Basque. In addition, many more words were borrowed from Latin through the influence of written language and the liturgical language of the Church. The loanwords were taken from both Classical Latin and Renaissance Latin, the form of Latin in use at that time.
According to the theories of Ramón Menéndez Pidal, local sociolects of Vulgar Latin evolved into Spanish, in the north of Iberia, in an area centered in the city of Burgos, and this dialect was later brought to the city of Toledo, where the written standard of Spanish was first developed, in the 13th century. In this formative stage, Spanish developed a strongly differing variant from its close cousin, Leonese, and, according to some authors, was distinguished by a heavy Basque influence. This distinctive dialect spread to southern Spain with the advance of the Reconquista, and meanwhile gathered a sizable lexical influence from the Arabic of Al-Andalus, much of it indirectly, through the Romance Mozarabic dialects. The written standard for this new language was developed in the cities of Toledo, in the 13th to 16th centuries, and Madrid, from the 1570s.
The development of the Spanish sound system from that of Vulgar Latin exhibits most of the changes that are typical of Western Romance languages, including lenition of intervocalic consonants. The diphthongization of Latin stressed short e and o—which occurred in open syllables in French and Italian, but not at all in Catalan or Portuguese—is found in both open and closed syllables in Spanish, as shown in the following table:


Spanish is marked by palatalization of the Latin double consonants nn and ll.
The consonant written u or v in Latin and pronounced in Classical Latin had probably "fortified" to a bilabial fricative in Vulgar Latin. In early Spanish it merged with the consonant written b. In modern Spanish, there is no difference between the pronunciation of orthographic b and v.
Typical of Spanish, attributed by some scholars to a Basque substratum was the mutation of Latin initial f into h- whenever it was followed by a vowel that did not diphthongize. The h-, still preserved in spelling, is now silent in most varieties of the language, although in some Andalusian and Caribbean dialects, it is still aspirated in some words. Because of borrowings from Latin and neighboring Romance languages, there are many f-/h- doublets in modern Spanish: Fernando and Hernando, ferrero and herrero, fierro and hierro, and fondo and hondo ; additionally, hacer is cognate to the root word of satisfacer, and hecho is similarly cognate to the root word of satisfecho.
Compare the examples in the following table:


Some consonant clusters of Latin also produced characteristically different results in these languages, as shown in the examples in the following table:


In the 15th and 16th centuries, Spanish underwent a dramatic change in the pronunciation of its sibilant consonants, known in Spanish as the reajuste de las sibilantes, which resulted in the distinctive velar pronunciation of the letter and—in a large part of Spain—the characteristic interdental for the letter . See History of Spanish (Modern development of the Old Spanish sibilants) for details.
The Gramática de la lengua castellana, written in Salamanca in 1492 by Elio Antonio de Nebrija, was the first grammar written for a modern European language. According to a popular anecdote, when Nebrija presented it to Queen Isabella I, she asked him what was the use of such a work, and he answered that language is the instrument of empire. In his introduction to the grammar, dated 18 August 1492, Nebrija wrote that "... language was always the companion of empire."
From the 16th century onwards, the language was taken to the Spanish-discovered America and the Spanish East Indies via Spanish colonization of America. Miguel de Cervantes, author of Don Quixote, is such a well-known reference in the world that Spanish is often called la lengua de Cervantes.
In the 20th century, Spanish was introduced to Equatorial Guinea and the Western Sahara, and to areas of the United States that had not been part of the Spanish Empire, such as Spanish Harlem in New York City. For details on borrowed words and other external influences upon Spanish, see Influences on the Spanish language.

Geographical distribution

Spanish is the primary language in 20 countries worldwide. As of 2025, it is estimated that about 519 million people speak Spanish as a native language, making it the second most spoken language by number of native speakers. An additional 117 million speak Spanish as a second or foreign language, making it the fourth most spoken language in the world overall after English, Mandarin Chinese, and Hindi with a total number of 636 million speakers. Spanish is also the third most used language on the Internet, after English and Chinese.

Europe

Spanish is the official language of Spain. Upon the emergence of the Castilian Crown as the dominant power in the Iberian Peninsula by the end of the Middle Ages, the Romance vernacular associated with this polity became increasingly used in instances of prestige and influence, and the distinction between "Castilian" and "Spanish" started to become blurred. Hard policies imposing the language's hegemony in an intensely centralising Spanish state were established from the 18th century onward.
Other European territories in which it is also widely spoken include Gibraltar and Andorra.
Spanish is also spoken by immigrant communities in other European countries, such as the United Kingdom, France, Italy, and Germany. Spanish is an official language of the European Union.

Americas

Hispanic America

Today, the majority of the Spanish speakers live in Hispanic America. Nationally, Spanish is the official language—either de facto or de jure—of Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Puerto Rico, Uruguay, and Venezuela.

United States

Spanish language has a long history in the territory of the current-day United States dating back to the 16th century. In the wake of the 1848 Guadalupe Hidalgo Treaty, hundreds of thousands of Spanish speakers became a minoritized community in the United States. The 20th century saw further massive growth of Spanish speakers in areas where they had been hitherto scarce.
According to the 2020 census, over 60 million people of the U.S. population were of Hispanic or Hispanic American by origin. In turn, 41.8 million people in the United States aged five or older speak Spanish at home, or about 13% of the population. Spanish predominates in the unincorporated territory of Puerto Rico, where it is also an official language along with English.
Spanish is by far the most common second language in the country, with over 50 million total speakers if non-native or second-language speakers are included. While English is the de facto national language of the country, Spanish is often used in public services and notices at the federal and state levels. Spanish is also used in administration in the state of New Mexico. The language has a strong influence in major metropolitan areas such as those of Los Angeles, San Diego, Miami, San Antonio, New York, San Francisco, Dallas, Tucson and Phoenix of the Arizona Sun Corridor, as well as more recently, Chicago, Las Vegas, Boston, Denver, Houston, Indianapolis, Oklahoma City, Philadelphia, Cleveland, Salt Lake City, Atlanta, Nashville, Orlando, Tampa, Raleigh and Baltimore-Washington, D.C. due to 20th- and 21st-century immigration.

Rest of the Americas

Although Spanish has no official recognition in the former British colony of Belize where English is the sole official language, according to the 2022 census, 54% of the total population are able to speak the language.
Due to its proximity to Spanish-speaking countries and small existing native Spanish speaking minority, Trinidad and Tobago has implemented Spanish language teaching into its education system. The Trinidadian and Tobagonian government launched the Spanish as a First Foreign Language initiative in March 2005.
Spanish has historically had a significant presence on the Dutch Caribbean islands of Aruba, Bonaire and Curaçao throughout the centuries and in present times. The majority of the populations of each island speak Spanish at varying although often high degrees of fluency. The local language Papiamentu is heavily influenced by Venezuelan Spanish.
In addition to sharing most of its borders with Spanish-speaking countries, the creation of Mercosur in the early 1990s induced a favorable situation for the promotion of Spanish language teaching in Brazil. In 2005, the National Congress of Brazil approved a bill, signed into law by the President, making it mandatory for schools to offer Spanish as an alternative foreign language course in both public and private secondary schools in Brazil. In September 2016 this law was revoked by Michel Temer after the impeachment of Dilma Rousseff. In many border towns and villages along Paraguay and Uruguay, a mixed language known as Portuñol is spoken.

Africa

Sub-Saharan Africa

Equatorial Guinea is the only Spanish-speaking country located entirely in Africa, with the language introduced during the Spanish colonial period. Enshrined in the constitution as an official language, Spanish features prominently in the Equatoguinean education system and is the primary language used in government and business. Spanish is spoken as a native language by a small minority in Equatorial Guinea, primarily in larger cities. The Instituto Cervantes estimates that 87.7% of the population is fluent in Spanish. The proportion of proficient Spanish speakers in Equatorial Guinea exceeds the proportion of proficient speakers in other West and Central African nations of their respective colonial languages.
Spanish is spoken by very small communities in Angola due to Cuban influence from the Cold War and in South Sudan among South Sudanese natives that relocated to Cuba during the Sudanese wars and returned for their country's independence.

North Africa and Macaronesia

Spanish is also spoken in the integral territories of Spain in Africa, namely the cities of Ceuta and Melilla and the Canary Islands, located in the Atlantic Ocean some off the northwest of the African mainland. The Spanish spoken in the Canary Islands traces its origins back to the Castilian conquest in the 15th century, and, in addition to a resemblance to Western Andalusian speech patterns, it also features strong influence from the Spanish varieties spoken in the Americas, which in turn have also been influenced historically by Canarian Spanish. The Spanish spoken in North Africa by native bilingual speakers of Arabic or Berber who also speak Spanish as a second language features characteristics involving the variability of the vowel system.
While far from its heyday during the Spanish protectorate in Morocco, the Spanish language has some presence in northern Morocco, stemming for example from the availability of certain Spanish-language media. According to a 2012 survey by Morocco's Royal Institute for Strategic Studies, penetration of Spanish in Morocco reaches 4.6% of the population. Many northern Moroccans have rudimentary knowledge of Spanish, with Spanish being particularly significant in areas adjacent to Ceuta and Melilla. Spanish also has a presence in the education system of the country.
In Western Sahara, formerly Spanish Sahara, a primarily Hassaniya Arabic-speaking territory, Spanish was officially spoken as the language of the colonial administration during the late 19th and 20th centuries. Today, Spanish is present in the partially-recognized Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic as its secondary official language, and in the Sahrawi refugee camps in Tindouf, where the Spanish language is still taught as a second language, largely by Cuban educators.
Spanish is also an official language of the African Union.

Asia

Image:La-solidaridad2.jpg|thumb|upright|left|An 1892 issue of La Solidaridad, a Spanish-language newspaper on the colonial Philippines published in Barcelona by Filipino exiles and international students
Spanish was an official language of the Philippines from the beginning of Spanish administration in 1565 to a constitutional change in 1973. During Philippines (1521–1898)|Spanish colonization], it was the language of government, trade, and education, and was spoken as a first language by Spaniards and educated Filipinos. Despite a public education system set up by the colonial government, by the end of Spanish rule in 1898, only about 10% of the population had knowledge of Spanish, mostly those of Spanish descent or elite standing.
Spanish continued to be official and used in Philippine literature and press during the early years of American administration after the Spanish–American War but was eventually replaced by English as the primary language of administration and education by the 1920s. Nevertheless, despite a significant decrease in influence and speakers, Spanish remained an official language of the Philippines upon independence in 1946, alongside English and Filipino, a standardized version of Tagalog.
Spanish was briefly removed from official status in 1973 but reimplemented under the administration of Ferdinand Marcos two months later. It remained an official language until the ratification of the present constitution in 1987, in which it was re-designated as a voluntary and optional auxiliary language. Additionally, the constitution, in its Article XIV, stipulates that the government shall provide the people of the Philippines with a Spanish-language translation of the country's constitution. In recent years changing attitudes among non-Spanish speaking Filipinos have helped spur a revival of the language, and starting in 2009 Spanish was reintroduced as part of the basic education curriculum in a number of public high schools, becoming the largest foreign language program offered by the public school system, with over 7,000 students studying the language in the 2021–2022 school year alone. The local business process outsourcing industry has also helped boost the language's economic prospects. Today, while the actual number of proficient Spanish speakers is around 400,000, or under 0.5% of the population, a new generation of Spanish speakers in the Philippines has likewise emerged, though speaker estimates vary widely.
Aside from standard Spanish, a Spanish-based creole language called Chavacano developed in the southern Philippines. However, it is not mutually intelligible with Spanish. The number of Chavacano-speakers was estimated at 1.2 million in 1996. The local languages of the Philippines also retain significant Spanish influence, with many words derived from Mexican Spanish, owing to the administration of the islands by Spain through New Spain until 1821, until direct governance from Madrid afterwards to 1898.

Oceania

Spanish is the official and most spoken language on Easter Island, which is geographically part of Polynesia in Oceania and politically part of Chile. However, Easter Island's traditional language is Rapa Nui, an Eastern Polynesian language.
As a legacy of comprising the former Spanish East Indies, Spanish loan words are present in the local languages of Guam, Northern Mariana Islands, Palau, Marshall Islands and Micronesia.
In addition, in Australia and New Zealand, there are native Spanish communities, resulting from emigration from Spanish-speaking countries.

Spanish speakers by country

20 countries and one United States territory speak Spanish officially, and the language has a significant unofficial presence in the rest of the United States along with Andorra, Belize and the territory of Gibraltar.

Grammar

Most of the grammatical and typological features of Spanish are shared with the other Romance languages. Spanish is a fusional language. The noun and adjective systems exhibit two genders and two numbers. In addition, articles and some pronouns and determiners have a neuter gender in their singular form. There are about fifty conjugated forms per verb, with 3 tenses: past, present, future; 2 aspects for past: perfective, imperfective; 4 moods: indicative, subjunctive, conditional, imperative; 3 persons: first, second, third; 2 numbers: singular, plural; 3 verboid forms: infinitive, gerund, and past participle. The indicative mood is the unmarked one, while the subjunctive mood expresses uncertainty or indetermination, and is commonly paired with the conditional, which is a mood used to express "would" ; the imperative is a mood to express a command, commonly a one word phrase – "¡Di!".
Verbs express T–V distinction by using different persons for formal and informal addresses.
Spanish syntax is considered right-branching, meaning that subordinate or modifying constituents tend to be placed after head words. The language uses prepositions, and usually—though not always—places adjectives after nouns, as do most other Romance languages.
Spanish is classified as a subject–verb–object language; however, as in most Romance languages, constituent order is highly variable and governed mainly by topicalization and focus. It is a "pro-drop", or "null-subject" language—that is, it allows the deletion of subject pronouns when they are pragmatically unnecessary. Spanish is described as a "verb-framed" language, meaning that the direction of motion is expressed in the verb while the mode of locomotion is expressed adverbially.

Phonology

The Spanish phonological system evolved from that of Vulgar Latin. Its development exhibits some traits in common with other Western Romance languages, others with the neighboring Hispanic varieties—especially Leonese and Aragonese—as well as other features unique to Spanish. Spanish is alone among its immediate neighbors in having undergone frequent aspiration and eventual loss of the Latin initial sound. The Latin initial consonant sequences pl-, cl-, and fl- in Spanish typically merge as ll-, while in Aragonese they are preserved in most dialects, and in Leonese they present a variety of outcomes, including,, and. Where Latin had -li- before a vowel or the ending -iculus, -icula, Old Spanish produced, that in Modern Spanish became the velar fricative, whereas neighboring languages have the palatal lateral .

Segmental phonology

The Spanish phonemic inventory consists of five vowel phonemes and 17 to 19 consonant phonemes. The main allophonic variation among vowels is the reduction of the high vowels and to glides— and respectively—when unstressed and adjacent to another vowel. Some instances of the mid vowels and, determined lexically, alternate with the diphthongs and respectively when stressed, in a process that is better described as morphophonemic rather than phonological, as it is not predictable from phonology alone.
The Spanish consonant system is characterized by three nasal phonemes, and one or two lateral phoneme, which in syllable-final position lose their contrast and are subject to assimilation to a following consonant; three voiceless stops and the affricate ; three or four voiceless fricatives; a set of voiced obstruents—,,, and sometimes —which alternate between approximant and plosive allophones depending on the environment; and a phonemic distinction between the "tapped" and "trilled" r-sounds.
In the following table of consonant phonemes, is marked with an asterisk to indicate that it is preserved only in some dialects. In most dialects it has been merged with in the merger called yeísmo. Similarly, is also marked with an asterisk to indicate that most dialects do not distinguish it from, although this is not a true merger but an outcome of different evolution of sibilants in southern Spain.
The phoneme is in parentheses to indicate that it appears only in loanwords. Each of the voiced obstruent phonemes,,, and appears to the right of a pair of voiceless phonemes, to indicate that, while the voiceless phonemes maintain a phonemic contrast between plosive and fricative, the voiced ones alternate allophonically between plosive and approximant pronunciations.

Prosody

Spanish is classified by its rhythm as a syllable-timed language: each syllable has approximately the same duration regardless of stress.
Spanish intonation varies significantly according to dialect but generally conforms to a pattern of falling tone for declarative sentences and wh-questions and rising tone for yes/no questions. There are no syntactic markers to distinguish between questions and statements and thus, the recognition of declarative or interrogative depends entirely on intonation.
Stress most often occurs on any of the last three syllables of a word, with some rare exceptions at the fourth-to-last or earlier syllables. Stress tends to occur as follows:
  • in words that end with a monophthong, on the penultimate syllable
  • when the word ends in a diphthong, on the final syllable.
  • in words that end with a consonant, on the last syllable, with the exception of two grammatical endings: -n, for third-person-plural of verbs, and -s, for plural of nouns and adjectives or for second-person-singular of verbs. However, even though a significant number of nouns and adjectives ending with -n are also stressed on the penult, the great majority of nouns and adjectives ending with -n are stressed on their last syllable.
  • Preantepenultimate stress occurs rarely, only on verbs with clitic pronouns attached.
In addition to the many exceptions to these tendencies, there are numerous minimal pairs that contrast solely on stress such as sábana and sabana ; límite, limite and limité ; líquido, liquido and liquidó.
The orthographic system unambiguously reflects where the stress occurs: in the absence of an accent mark, the stress falls on the last syllable unless the last letter is,, or a vowel, in which cases the stress falls on the next-to-last syllable. Exceptions to those rules are indicated by an acute accent mark over the vowel of the stressed syllable.

Speaker population

Spanish is the official, or national language in 18 countries and one territory in the Americas, Spain, and Equatorial Guinea. With a population of over 410 million, Hispanophone America accounts for the vast majority of Spanish speakers, of which Mexico is the most populous Spanish-speaking country. In the European Union, Spanish is the mother tongue of 8% of the population, with an additional 7% speaking it as a second language. Additionally, Spanish is the second most spoken language in the United States and is by far the most popular foreign language among students. In 2015, it was estimated that over 50 million Americans spoke Spanish, about 41 million of whom were native speakers. With continued immigration and increased use of the language domestically in public spheres and media, the number of Spanish speakers in the United States is expected to continue growing over the forthcoming decades.

Dialectal variation

While being mutually intelligible, there are important variations in the spoken Spanish of the various regions of Spain and throughout the Spanish-speaking areas of the Americas.
The national variety with the most speakers is Mexican Spanish. It is spoken by more than twenty percent of the world's Spanish speakers. One of its main features is the reduction or loss of unstressed vowels, mainly when they are in contact with the sound /s/.
In Spain, northern dialects are popularly thought of as closer to the standard, although positive attitudes toward southern dialects have increased significantly in the last 50 years. The speech from the educated classes of Madrid is the standard variety for use on radio and television in Spain and it is indicated by many as the one that has most influenced the written standard for Spanish. Central Spanish speech patterns have been noted to be in the process of merging with more innovative southern varieties, as an emerging interdialectal levelled koine buffered between the Madrid's traditional national standard and the Seville speech trends.

Phonology

The four main phonological divisions are based respectively on the phoneme, the debuccalization of syllable-final, the sound of the spelled, and the phoneme.
  • The phoneme, a voiceless dental fricative as in English thing, is maintained by a majority of Spain's population, especially in the northern and central parts of the country. In other areas, does not exist and occurs instead. The maintenance of phonemic contrast is called distinción in Spanish, while the merger is generally called seseo or, occasionally, ceceo. In most of Hispanic America, the spelled before or, and spelled is always pronounced as a voiceless dental sibilant.
  • The debuccalization of syllable-final is associated with the southern half of Spain and lowland Americas: Central America, the Caribbean, coastal areas of southern Mexico, and South America except Andean highlands. Debuccalization is frequently called "aspiration" in English, and aspiración in Spanish. When there is no debuccalization, the syllable-final is pronounced as voiceless "apico-alveolar" sibilant or as a voiceless dental sibilant in the same fashion as in the next paragraph.
  • The sound that corresponds to the letter is pronounced in northern and central Spain as a voiceless "apico-alveolar" sibilant, with a weak "hushing" sound reminiscent of fricatives. In Andalusia, Canary Islands and most of Hispanic America it is pronounced as a voiceless dental sibilant, much like the most frequent pronunciation of the /s/ of English.
  • The phoneme, spelled, a lateral approximant|palatal lateral] consonant that can be approximated by the sound of the of English million, tends to be maintained in less-urbanized areas of northern Spain and in the highland areas of South America, as well as in Paraguay and lowland Bolivia. Meanwhile, in the speech of most other Spanish speakers, it is merged with, a non-lateral, usually voiced, usually fricative, palatal consonant, sometimes compared to English as in yacht and spelled in Spanish. As with other forms of allophony across world languages, the small difference of the spelled and the spelled is usually not perceived by people who do not produce them as different phonemes. Such a phonemic merger is called yeísmo in Spanish. In Rioplatense Spanish, the merged phoneme is generally pronounced as a postalveolar fricative, either voiced in the central and western parts of the dialectal region, or voiceless in and around Buenos Aires and Montevideo.

Morphology

The main morphological variations between dialects of Spanish involve differing uses of pronouns, especially those of the second person and, to a lesser extent, the object pronouns of the third person.

Voseo

Virtually all dialects of Spanish make the distinction between a formal and a familiar register in the second-person singular and thus have two different pronouns meaning "you": usted in the formal and either tú or vos in the familiar, with the choice of tú or vos varying from one dialect to another. The use of vos and its verb forms is called voseo. In a few dialects, all three pronouns are used, with usted, tú, and vos denoting respectively formality, familiarity, and intimacy.
In voseo, vos is the subject form and the form for the object of a preposition, while the direct and indirect object forms, and the possessives, are the same as those associated with tú: Vos sabés que tus amigos te respetan.
The verb forms of the general voseo are the same as those used with tú except in the present tense verbs. The forms for vos generally can be derived from those of vosotros by deleting the glide, or, where it appears in the ending: vosotros pensáis > vos pensás; vosotros volvéis > vos volvés, pensad! > pensá!, volved! > volvé!.
In Central American voseo, the tú and vos forms differ in the present subjunctive as well:
In Chilean voseo, almost all vos forms are distinct from the corresponding standard tú-forms.
The use of the pronoun vos with the verb forms of tú is called "pronominal voseo". Conversely, the use of the verb forms of vos with the pronoun tú is called "verbal voseo". In Chile, for example, verbal voseo is much more common than the actual use of the pronoun vos, which is usually reserved for highly informal situations.
Distribution in Spanish-speaking regions of the Americas
Although vos is not used in Spain, it occurs in many Spanish-speaking regions of the Americas as the primary spoken form of the second-person singular familiar pronoun, with wide differences in social consideration. Generally, it can be said that there are zones of exclusive use of tuteo in the following areas: almost all of Mexico, the West Indies, Panama, most of Colombia, Peru, Venezuela and coastal Ecuador.
Tuteo as a cultured form alternates with voseo as a popular or rural form in Bolivia, in the north and south of Peru, in Andean Ecuador, in small zones of the Venezuelan Andes, and in a large part of Colombia. Some researchers maintain that voseo can be heard in some parts of eastern Cuba, and others assert that it is absent from the island.
Tuteo exists as the second-person usage with an intermediate degree of formality alongside the more familiar voseo in Chile, in the Venezuelan state of Zulia, on the Caribbean coast of Colombia, in the Azuero Peninsula in Panama, in the Mexican state of Chiapas, and in parts of Guatemala.
Areas of generalized voseo include Argentina, Nicaragua, eastern Bolivia, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Costa Rica, Paraguay, Uruguay and the Colombian departments of Antioquia, Caldas, Risaralda, Quindio and Valle del Cauca.

Ustedes

Ustedes functions as formal and informal second-person plural in all of Hispanic America, the Canary Islands, and parts of Andalusia. It agrees with verbs in the 3rd person plural. Most of Spain maintains the formal/familiar distinction with ustedes and vosotros respectively. The use of ustedes with the second person plural is sometimes heard in Andalusia, but it is non-standard.

Usted

Usted is the usual second-person singular pronoun in a formal context, but it is used jointly with the third-person singular voice of the verb. It is used to convey respect toward someone who is a generation older or is of higher authority. It is also used in a familiar context by many speakers in Colombia and Costa Rica and in parts of Ecuador and Panama, to the exclusion of tú or vos. This usage is sometimes called in Spanish.
In Central America, especially in Honduras, usted is often used as a formal pronoun to convey respect between the members of a romantic couple. Usted is also used that way between parents and children in the Andean regions of Ecuador, Colombia and Venezuela.

Third-person object pronouns

Most speakers use the pronouns lo and la for direct objects, and le for indirect objects. The usage is sometimes called "etymological", as these direct and indirect object pronouns are a continuation, respectively, of the accusative and dative pronouns of Latin, the ancestor language of Spanish.
A number of dialects use additional rules for the pronouns, such as animacy, or count noun vs. mass noun, rather than just direct vs. indirect object. The ways of using the pronouns in such varieties are called "leísmo", "loísmo", or "laísmo", according to which respective pronoun, le, lo, or la, covers more than just the etymological usage.

Vocabulary

Some words can be significantly different in different Hispanophone countries. Most Spanish speakers can recognize other Spanish forms even in places where they are not commonly used, but Spaniards generally do not recognize specifically American usages. For example, Spanish mantequilla, aguacate and albaricoque correspond to manteca, palta, and damasco, respectively, in Argentina, Chile, Paraguay, Peru, and Uruguay. In the healthcare context, an assessment of the Spanish translation of the QWB-SA identified some regional vocabulary choices and US-specific concepts, which cannot be successfully implemented in Spain without adaptation.

Vocabulary

Spanish vocabulary has been influenced by several languages. As in other European languages, Classical Greek words are abundant in the terminologies of several fields, including art, science, politics, nature, etc. Its vocabulary has also been influenced by Arabic, having developed during the Al-Andalus era in the Iberian Peninsula, with around 8% of its vocabulary having Arabic lexical roots. It may have also been influenced by Basque, Iberian, Celtiberian, Visigothic, and other neighboring Ibero-Romance languages. Additionally, it has absorbed vocabulary from other languages, particularly other Romance languages such as French, Mozarabic, Portuguese, Galician, Catalan, Occitan, and Sardinian, as well as from Quechua, Nahuatl, and other indigenous languages of the Americas. In the 18th century, words taken from French referring above all to fashion, cooking and bureaucracy were added to the Spanish lexicon. In the 19th century, new loanwords were incorporated, especially from English and German, but also from Italian in areas related to music, particularly opera and cooking. In the 20th century, the pressure of English in the fields of technology, computing, science and sports was greatly accentuated.
In general, Hispanic America is more susceptible to loanwords from English or Anglicisms. For example: mouse is used in Hispanic America, in Spain ratón is used. This happens largely due to closer contact with the United States. For its part, Spain is known by the use of Gallicisms or words taken from neighboring France.

Relation to other languages

Spanish is closely related to the other West Iberian Romance languages, including Asturian, Aragonese, Galician, Ladino, Leonese, Mirandese and Portuguese. It is somewhat less similar, to varying degrees, from other members of the Romance language family.
It is generally acknowledged that Portuguese and Spanish speakers can communicate in written form, with varying degrees of mutual intelligibility. Mutual intelligibility of the written Spanish and Portuguese languages is high, lexically and grammatically. Ethnologue gives estimates of the lexical similarity between related languages in terms of precise percentages. For Spanish and Portuguese, that figure is 89%, although phonologically the two languages are quite dissimilar. Italian on the other hand, is phonologically similar to Spanish, while sharing lower lexical and grammatical similarity of 82%. Mutual intelligibility between Spanish and French or between Spanish and Romanian is lower still, given lexical similarity ratings of 75% and 71% respectively. Comprehension of Spanish by French speakers who have not studied the language is much lower, at an estimated 45%. In general, thanks to the common features of the writing systems of the Romance languages, interlingual comprehension of the written word is greater than that of oral communication.
The following table compares the forms of some common words in several Romance languages:

LatinSpanishGalicianPortugueseAstur-LeoneseAragoneseCatalanFrenchItalianRomanianEnglish
1,2
"we "		nosotrosnós, nosoutros3nós, nós outros3nós, nosotrosnusatrosnosaltres
nous4noi, noialtri5noi'we'

"true brother"		hermanoirmánirmãohermanuchirmángermà
6		frèrefratellofrate'brother'

"day of Mars"

"third day"		martesMartes, Terza FeiraTerça-FeiraMartesMartesDimartsMardiMartedìMarți'Tuesday'
canción7
canción, cançom8cançãocanción
cantacançóchansoncanzonecântec'song'

más
máismaismásmás
més
pluspiùmai'more'
mano izquierda9
man esquerda9mão esquerda9
manu izquierda9
man cuchamà esquerra9
main gauchemano sinistramâna stângă'left hand'
"thing"

"no born thing"
"crumb"		nadanada
nada nada
cosaresrien, nulniente, nulla
mica 		nimic, nul'nothing'

"form-cheese"		quesoqueixoqueijoquesuquesoformatgefromageformaggio/caciocaș10'cheese'

1. In Romance etymology, Latin terms are given in the Accusative since most forms derive from this case.

2. As in "us very selves", an emphatic expression.

3. Also nós outros in early modern Portuguese, and nosoutros in Galician.

4. Alternatively nous autres in French.

5. noialtri in many Southern Italian dialects and languages.

6. Medieval Catalan.

7. Modified with the learned suffix -ción.

8. Depending on the written norm used.

9. From Basque esku, "hand" + erdi, "half, incomplete". This negative meaning also applies for Latin sinistra.

10. Romanian caș means a type of cheese. The universal term for cheese in Romanian is brânză.

Judaeo-Spanish

Judaeo-Spanish, also known as Ladino, is a variety of Spanish which preserves many features of medieval Spanish and some old Portuguese and is spoken by descendants of the Sephardi Jews who were expelled from Spain in the 15th century. While in Portugal the conversion of Jews occurred earlier and the assimilation of New Christians was overwhelming, in Spain the Jews kept their language and identity. The relationship of Ladino and Spanish is therefore comparable with that of the Yiddish language to German. Ladino speakers today are almost exclusively Sephardi Jews, with family roots in Turkey, Greece, or the Balkans, and living mostly in Israel, Turkey, and the United States, with a few communities in Hispanic America. Judaeo-Spanish lacks the Native American vocabulary which was acquired by standard Spanish during the Spanish colonial period, and it retains many archaic features which have since been lost in standard Spanish. It contains, however, other vocabulary which is not found in standard Spanish, including vocabulary from Hebrew, French, Greek and Turkish, and other languages spoken where the Sephardim settled.
Judaeo-Spanish is in serious danger of extinction because many native speakers today are elderly as well as elderly olim who have not transmitted the language to their children or grandchildren. However, it is experiencing a minor revival among Sephardi communities, especially in music. In Hispanic American communities, the danger of extinction is also due to assimilation by modern Spanish.
A related dialect is Haketia, the Judaeo-Spanish of northern Morocco. This too, tended to assimilate with modern Spanish, during the Spanish occupation of the region.

Writing system

Spanish is written in the Latin script, with the addition of the character . Formerly the digraphs and, were also considered single letters. However, the digraph, which also represents a distinct phoneme, was not similarly regarded as a single letter. Since 1994 and have been treated as letter pairs for collation purposes, though they remained a part of the alphabet until 2010. Words with are now alphabetically sorted between those with and, instead of following as they used to. The situation is similar for.
Thus, the Spanish alphabet has the following 27 letters:
Since 2010, none of the digraphs are considered letters by the Royal Spanish Academy.
The letters k and w are used only in words and names coming from foreign languages.
With the exclusion of a very small number of regional terms such as México, pronunciation can be entirely determined from spelling. Under the orthographic conventions, a typical Spanish word is stressed on the syllable before the last if it ends with a vowel or with a vowel followed by or an ; it is stressed on the last syllable otherwise. Exceptions to this rule are indicated by placing an acute accent on the stressed vowel.
The acute accent is used, in addition, to distinguish between certain homophones, especially when one of them is a stressed word and the other one is a clitic: compare el with él, or te with té, de versus dé, and se versus sé.
The interrogative pronouns also receive accents in direct or indirect questions, and some demonstratives can be accented when used as pronouns. Accent marks used to be omitted on capital letters, although the Real Academia Española advises against this and the orthographic conventions taught at schools enforce the use of the accent.
When u is written between g and a front vowel e or i, it indicates a "hard g" pronunciation. A diaeresis ü indicates that it is not silent as it normally would be.
Interrogative and exclamatory clauses are introduced with inverted question and exclamation marks and closed by the usual question and exclamation marks.

Organizations

Royal Spanish Academy

The Royal Spanish Academy, founded in 1713, together with the 21 other national ones, exercises a standardizing influence through its publication of dictionaries and widely respected grammar and style guides.
Because of influence and for other sociohistorical reasons, a standardized form of the language is widely acknowledged for use in literature, academic contexts and the media.

Association of Spanish Language Academies

The Association of Spanish Language Academies is the entity which regulates the Spanish language. It was created in Mexico in 1951 and represents the union of all the separate academies in the Spanish-speaking world. It comprises the academies of 23 countries, ordered by date of academy foundation: Spain, Colombia, Ecuador, Mexico, El Salvador, Venezuela, Chile, Peru, Guatemala, Costa Rica, Philippines, Panama, Cuba,
Paraguay, Dominican Republic, Bolivia, Nicaragua, Argentina, Uruguay, Honduras, Puerto Rico, United States and Equatorial Guinea.

Cervantes Institute

The Instituto Cervantes is a worldwide nonprofit organization created by the Spanish government in 1991. This organization has branches in 45 countries, with 88 centers devoted to the Spanish and Hispanic American cultures and Spanish language. The goals of the Institute are to promote universally the education, the study, and the use of Spanish as a second language, to support methods and activities that help the process of Spanish-language education, and to contribute to the advancement of the Spanish and Hispanic American cultures in non-Spanish-speaking countries. The institute's 2015 report "El español, una lengua viva" estimated that there were 559 million Spanish speakers worldwide. Its latest annual report "El español en el mundo 2018" counts 577 million Spanish speakers worldwide. Among the sources cited in the report is the U.S. Census Bureau, which estimates that the U.S. will have 138 million Spanish speakers by 2050, making it the biggest Spanish-speaking nation on earth, with Spanish the mother tongue of almost a third of its citizens.

Official use by international organizations

Spanish is one of the official languages of the United Nations, the European Union, the World Trade Organization, the Organization of American States, the Organization of Ibero-American States, the African Union, the Union of South American Nations, the Antarctic Treaty Secretariat, the Latin Union, the Caricom, the North American Free Trade Agreement, the Inter-American Development Bank, and numerous other international organizations.

Sample text

Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in Spanish:
Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in English:

Spanish words and phrases

Spanish-speaking world

Influences on the Spanish language

Dialects and languages influenced by Spanish

Spanish dialects and varieties