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Spain is a diverse country integrated by contrasting entities with varying economic and social structures, languages, and historical, political and cultural traditions. [1] [2] The Spanish constitution responds ambiguously to the claims of historic nationalities (such as the right of self-government) while proclaiming a common and indivisible homeland of all Spaniards.
The modern division of Spain into Autonomous Communities embodies an attempt to recognise nationalities and regional identities within Spain as a basis for devolution of power. From the Reconquista onwards, in most parts of the peninsula, territories have identified themselves as distinct from the rest of Spain in one of three ways.
Spaniards, [a] or Spanish people, are a people native to Spain.Within Spain, there are a number of national and regional ethnic identities that reflect the country's complex history, including a number of different languages, both indigenous and local linguistic descendants of the Roman-imposed Latin language, of which Spanish is the largest and the only one that is official throughout the ...
The incorporation into Spanish of learned, or "bookish" words from its own ancestor language, Latin, is arguably another form of lexical borrowing through the influence of written language and the liturgical language of the Church. Throughout the Middle Ages and into the early modern period, most literate Spanish-speakers were also literate in ...
In Basque-speaking regions, whose language is not of Romance origin (Basque is considered by many scholars to be a language isolate), some Basque speakers also use the term erdara or erdera [22] (foreign) specifically for Spanish, since for them, it is the prevalent foreign language, just as in the French Basque Country, "French language" is ...
Castilian (castellano), that is, Spanish, is the native language of the Castilians.Its origin is traditionally ascribed to an area south of the Cordillera Cantábrica, including the upper Ebro valley, in northern Spain, around the 8th and 9th centuries; however, the first written standard was developed in the 13th century in the southern city of Toledo.
Although Germanic languages by most accounts affected the phonological development very little, Spanish words of Germanic origin are present in all varieties of Modern Spanish. Many of the Spanish words of Germanic origin were already present in Vulgar Latin, and so they are shared with other Romance languages. [3]
The term gitano evolved from the word egiptano [10] ("Egyptian"), which was the Old Spanish demonym for someone from Egipto (Egypt). "Egiptano" was the regular adjective in Old Spanish for someone from Egypt, however, in Middle and Modern Spanish the irregular adjective egipcio supplanted egiptano to mean Egyptian, probably to differentiate Egyptians from Gypsies.