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As a Romance language, Spanish is a descendant of Latin. Around 75% of modern Spanish vocabulary is Latin in origin, including Latin borrowings from Ancient Greek. [12] [13] Alongside English and French, it is also one of the most taught foreign languages throughout the world. [14] Spanish is well represented in the humanities and social ...
The orthography attempts to mimic the Latin spelling, rather than to keep the pronunciation-based spelling of Old Spanish. [8] Thus, Old Spanish bever "to drink", bivir/vivir "to live" become beber, vivir , respectively, following the Latin spelling bibere, vīvere .
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.
Spanish is a Romance language which developed from Vulgar Latin in central areas of the Iberian Peninsula and has absorbed many loanwords from other Romance languages like French, Occitan, Catalan, Portuguese, and Italian. [1] Spanish also has lexical influences from Arabic and from Paleohispanic languages such as Iberian, Celtiberian and Basque.
Some Romance languages form plurals by adding /s/ (derived from the plural of the Latin accusative case), while others form the plural by changing the final vowel (by influence of Latin nominative plural endings, such as /i/) from some masculine nouns. Plural in /s/: Portuguese, Galician, Spanish, Catalan, [25] Occitan, Sardinian, Friulian ...
In another definition, Latin America designates the set of countries in the Americas where a Romance language (a language derived from Latin) predominates: Spanish, Portuguese, or French. Thus, it includes Mexico; most of Central and South America; and in the Caribbean, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and Haiti.
Portuguese and Spanish, although closely related Romance languages, differ in many aspects of their phonology, grammar, and lexicon.Both belong to a subset of the Romance languages known as West Iberian Romance, which also includes several other languages or dialects with fewer speakers, all of which are mutually intelligible to some degree.
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 ...