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A similar situation occurred in the American Southwest, including California, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas, where Spaniards, then criollos (Tejanos, Californios, etc.) followed by Chicanos (Mexican Americans) and later Mexican immigrants, kept the Spanish language alive before, during and after the American appropriation of those territories ...
In this sense Hispanic American Spanish is closer to the dialects spoken in the south of Spain. [citation needed] See List of words having different meanings in Spain and Hispanic America. Most Hispanic American Spanish usually features yeísmo: there is no distinction between ll and y . However realization varies greatly from region to region.
In all these countries, Latin American Spanish is the vernacular language of the majority of the population, giving Spanish the most native speakers of any Romance language. In Africa it is one of the official languages of Equatorial Guinea. Spanish was one of the official languages in the Philippines in Southeast Asia until 1973.
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 ("the language of Cervantes").
When other European powers began exploring and settling the zones that Spain and Portugal had claimed as their own, maps began to delineate the boundaries between empires. [6] As Latin America nation-states coalesced following independence in the early nineteenth century, map making was a standard national project. [7]
Much of Latin American Spanish shares some other Andalusian characteristics too, such as yeísmo, weakening of syllable-final /s/, pronunciation of historical /x/ or the j sound as a glottal fricative, and merging syllable-final /r/ and /l/. [6] Canarian Spanish is also strongly similar to Western Andalusian Spanish due to its settlement history.
17th c. Dutch map of the Americas Universities founded in Spanish America by the Spanish Empire. The empire in the Indies was a newly established dependency of the kingdom of Castile alone, so crown power was not impeded by any existing cortes (i.e. parliament), administrative or ecclesiastical institution, or seigneurial group. [65]
Spanish borrowed many words from other European languages: its close neighbors such as Catalan or Portuguese, other Romance languages such as Italian and French (this particularly during the Neoclassicist to Napoleonic periods, when French language and culture became the fashion at the royal court), and Germanic languages like English. For example: