Spanish

How Castilian grew out of Burgos and Toledo

Vulgar Latin reached Iberia with the Romans during the Second Punic War, from 210 BC, and met pre-Roman languages such as Proto-Basque, Iberian and Celtiberian. The first documents showing traces of Spanish date from the 9th century. According to Ramón Menéndez Pidal, the language formed in the north around Burgos and was carried to Toledo, where its written standard was first developed in the 13th century. It moved south with the Reconquista and absorbed the Arabic of Al-Andalus, much of it through Mozarabic: some 4,000 Arabic-derived words make up about 8% of the language today.

Elio Antonio de Nebrija wrote the Gramática de la lengua castellana in Salamanca in 1492, the first grammar of a modern European language. His introduction, dated 18 August 1492, says that language was always the companion of empire.

Why Latin f turned into a silent h

Where Latin f stood before a vowel that did not become a diphthong, Spanish turned it into h, a change some scholars attribute to a Basque substratum. The h is now silent in most varieties, and borrowings have left doublets such as Fernando and Hernando or fierro and hierro. Latin double nn and ll became ñ and ll, so annum gave año. In the 15th and 16th centuries the sibilants were reorganised, giving j its velar sound and, in much of Spain, z its interdental one. Orthographic b and v are pronounced alike.

Where Spanish travelled from Castile

From the 16th century Spanish colonisation carried the language to the Americas and the Spanish East Indies. In the 20th century it reached Equatorial Guinea, where the constitution makes it official alongside French and Portuguese, and Western Sahara. In the United States its history goes back to the 16th century; after the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo of 1848 hundreds of thousands of Spanish speakers became a minority there. In 2020, 41.8 million people aged five or older spoke Spanish at home, about 13% of the population, and New Mexico uses it in administration.