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Ñ-shaped animation showing flags of some countries and territories where Spanish is spoken. Spanish is the official language (either by law or de facto) in 20 sovereign states (including Equatorial Guinea, where it is official but not a native language), one dependent territory, and one partially recognized state, totaling around 442 million people.
While being mutually intelligible, there are important variations (phonological, grammatical, and lexical) 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 (sometimes called Castilian) is the only official language of the entire country and is spoken habitually and as a native language among a vast majority of the Spanish population. Spain is, along with Colombia [4] and after Mexico and the United States, [5] ranked third in the world as the country with the most Spanish speakers.
The Spanish language developed from Vulgar Latin in the North of the Iberian Peninsula, expanding quickly to the South. It has lexical influences from Arabic and possible substrate influences from Basque and (to a lesser extent) Celtiberian. It has been the only official language in Spain for most periods since the eighteenth century.
calculations by Francisco Ruiz from data of the Instituto Nacional de Estadística (2008 estimates). [4] [5] As well as "metropolitan area" data, [6] Ruiz has produced larger conurbation data for some areas. [7] The "conurbation" figure is used where available, and is cited as such; otherwise, the "metropolitan area" figure is used.
By this index Spain is the country with the highest variation between regions in the degree of regionalism, interpreted as reflecting "internal tensions within the Spanish state, where the dominant Castilian-speaking group seems to have become increasingly loyal to the state in response to pressures from non-Castilian areas for devolution or ...
A view of the flooded area after a deluge brought up to 200 liters of rain per square meter (50 gallons per square yard) in hours in La Torre neighborhood of Valencia, Spain on October 30, 2024
In addition to the general definition of Hispanophone, some groups in the Hispanic world make a distinction between Castilian-speaking [i] and Spanish-speaking, with the former term denoting the speakers of the Spanish language—also known as Castilian—and the latter the speakers of the Spanish or Hispanic languages (i.e. the languages of ...