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The Spanish Language Spread by Exploration and Trade
The Spanish language is one of the great romantic languages of the world. It is also technically part of the Italic subfamily, which is part of the Indo-European family of languages. Spanish is mainly spoken on the Iberian peninsula of Europe and throughout Latin America, and increasingly in North America, with an estimated 380 million native Spanish speakers.
Spanish Language Lesson - direct object pronouns:
While most often referred to as Spanish, the language is also sometimes known as Castilian, which is in reference to the dialect from which modern Spanish developed. The Castilian dialect originated from the area of the Cordillera Cantabrica, which is in the northern part of Spain. From that part of the Iberian peninsula, the language spread with trade and exploration.
Spanish explorers and colonists carried the Spanish language with then as they occupied, settled and populated different areas of the world. Colonists took the Spanish in Spain to many different areas, such as the nearby Canary Islands and the coast of Africa, more distant locales of South America, Central America and the southern portion of North America, as well as to the island nations of the Antilles and the Philippines.
Spanish is the official tongue of all of the countries of South America with the exception of Brazil and French Guyana, and of the six republics that make up Central America. It is also the official language of Mexico, Puerto Rico, Cuba and the Dominican Republic. In addition, Spanish is the second most widely spoken language in the United States leading to a great interest in Spanish lessons. There are large and growing communities of Spanish-speakers found in Arizona, California, New Mexico, New York City, Texas and the southern part of Florida, as well as other states.
On the European Iberian peninsula, the areas where Spanish is spoken does not exactly follow the political borders of the country of Spain. Spain actually is made up of three non-Spanish-speaking areas: Galicia, which is in the north-western area of the country, where Gallegan (which is actually a dialect of the Portuguese language) is spoken; the Basque provinces in the northern part of Spain where the language of Basque (a unique agglutinative language) is spoken; and, Catalonia on the east coast of Spain, where Catalan (also considered a romance language) is spoken. In addition, Catalan is spoken in the Balearic Islands, in the Pyrenees-Orientatles area of France, in Argentina and in parts of Cuba.
The grammatical structure of the language is very much similar to the basics of the other romance languages such as French, Portuguese and Italian. This makes it much easier for someone who speaks another Roman language to quickly learn Spanish and conjugate Spanish verbs, and vice versa.
The great majority of the Spanish language springs directly from Latin, as do all the romance languages. However, the Spanish vocabulary has also been augmented over the centuries as the Iberian peninsula came under the power of different conquers. The Visigoths brought with them many words of Germanic origin, while the Muslims brought Moorish architecture and many Arabic words that melded into Spanish.
