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The language known today as Spanish is derived from spoken Latin, which was brought to the Iberian Peninsula by the Romans after their occupation of the peninsula that started in the late 3rd century BC. Today it is the world's 4th most widely spoken language, after English, Mandarin Chinese and Hindi. [1]
Today, it is a global language with about 500 million native speakers, mainly in the Americas and Spain, and about 600 million speakers including second language speakers. [ 4 ] [ 5 ] Spanish is the official language of 20 countries , as well as one of the six official languages of the United Nations .
The majority of languages of Spain [4] belong to the Romance language family, of which Spanish is the only one with official status in the whole country. [5] [6] Others, including Catalan/Valencian (in Catalonia, Valencia and the Balearic Islands) and Galician (in Galicia), enjoy official status in their respective autonomous regions, similar to Basque in the northeast of the country (a non ...
Although the first known text by native speakers dates to 1885, the first record of the language is a list of words recorded in 1793 by Alexander MacKenzie. 1885: Motu: grammar by W.G. Lawes: 1886: Guugu Yimidhirr: notes by Johann Flierl, Wilhelm Poland and Georg Schwarz, culminating in Walter Roth's The Structure of the Koko Yimidir Language ...
A language that uniquely represents the national identity of a state, nation, and/or country and is so designated by a country's government; some are technically minority languages. (On this page a national language is followed by parentheses that identify it as a national language status.) Some countries have more than one language with this ...
Most spoken languages, Ethnologue, 2025 [6] Language Family Branch First-language (L1) speakers Second-language (L2) speakers Total speakers (L1+L2) English (excl. creole languages) Indo-European: Germanic: 390 million 1.1 billion 1.5 billion Mandarin Chinese (incl. Standard Chinese, but excl. other varieties) Sino-Tibetan: Sinitic: 990 million ...
In a victory for millions of Spaniards who speak a language other than Spanish, the European nation's Parliament allowed its national legislators to use Catalan, Basque and Galician for the first ...
The origin of language, its relationship with human evolution, and its consequences have been subjects of study for centuries.Scholars wishing to study the origins of language draw inferences from evidence such as the fossil record, archaeological evidence, contemporary language diversity, studies of language acquisition, and comparisons between human language and systems of animal ...