spanish-classes-in-chennai: August 2016

Wednesday, 24 August 2016

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Spanish dialects and varieties

Some of the regional varieties of the Spanish language are quite divergent from one another, especially in pronunciation and vocabulary, and less so in grammar.

While all Spanish dialects use the same written standard, all spoken varieties differ from the written variety, in different degrees. spanish-speaking-courses-in-chennai There are differences between European Spanish (also called Peninsular Spanish) and the Spanish of the Americas, as well as many different dialect areas both within Spain and within Hispanic America.

There are significant differences in vocabulary among regional varieties of Spanish, particularly in the domains of food products, everyday objects, and clothes; and many Hispanic American varieties show considerable lexical influence from Native American languages.

Relation to other languages

Spanish is closely related to the other West Iberian Romance languages, including Asturian, Aragonese, Catalan, Galician, Ladino, Leonese, Mirandese and Portuguese.

It is generally acknowledged that Portuguese- and Spanish-speakers can communicate, although with varying degrees of difficulty. Meanwhile, mutual intelligibility of the written Spanish and Portuguese languages is very high, given that the difficulties of the spoken forms are based more on phonology than on grammatical and lexical dissimilarities. spanish-speaking-courses-in-chennai Ethnologue gives estimates of the lexical similarity between related languages in terms of precise percentages. For Spanish and Portuguese, that figure is 89%. Italian, on the other hand—although its phonology is more similar to that of Spanish—is said to have a lexical similarity of 82%. Mutual intelligibility between Spanish and French or between Spanish and Romanian is lower still, given lexical similarity ratings of 75% and 71% respectively. And comprehension of Spanish by French speakers who have not studied the language is much lower, at an estimated 45%. In general, thanks to the common features of the writing systems of the Romance languages, interlingual comprehension of the written word is greater than that of oral communication.

Spanish orthography is the orthography used in the Spanish language. The alphabet uses the Latin script.

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The spelling is fairly phonemic, especially in comparison to more opaque orthographies like English and Irish, having a relatively consistent mapping of graphemes to phonemes; in other words, the pronunciation of words can largely be predicted from the spelling. The punctuation is similar to that used in other Romance languages and in English.

Spanish orthography is such that the pronunciation of most words is unambiguous given their written form;

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These orthographic rules are similar to, but not the same as, those of other Romance languages of the Iberian Peninsula, such as Portuguese, Catalan and Galician.

Names given to the Spanish language

There are two names given in Spanish to the Spanish language: español ("Spanish") and castellano ("Castilian"). Spanish speakers from different countries or backgrounds can show a preference for one term or the other, or use them indiscriminately, but political issues or common usage might lead speakers to prefer one term over the other.

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This article identifies the differences between those terms, the countries or backgrounds that show a preference for one or the other, and the implications the choice of words might have for a native Spanish speaker.

Generally speaking, both terms can refer to the Spanish language as a whole, with a preference for one over the other that depends on the context or the speaker's origin.

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Castellano (as well as Castilian in English) has another, more restricted, meaning, relating either to the old Romance language spoken in the Kingdom of Castile in the Middle Ages, predecessor of the modern Spanish language, or to the variety of Spanish nowadays spoken in the historical region of Castile, in central Spain.

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Spanish as official language or national language

Spanish is the majority language in 21 sovereign states and several dependent territories, totaling around 442 million people. best-spanish-language-courses-in-chennai Spanish is the main or only language of communication of the vast majority of the population; official documents are written chiefly or solely in that language; and it is taught in schools and utilized as the primary medium of instruction as part of the official curriculum.

In Spain, Spanish is the sole official language at the national level, while the languages of Basque, Catalan/Valencian, and Galician are co-official alongside Spanish in certain sub-national regions. best-spanish-language-courses-in-chennai In Peru, Spanish is the sole official language at the national level while Quechua and Aymara hold co-official status in selected regions.

In Ecuador, Spanish is the sole official language at the national level while the Kichwa (Northern Quechua) and Shuar languages hold co-official status in selected regions.

In Bolivia, the national constitution recognizes Spanish and various indigenous languages of Bolivia as official at the national level, though Spanish is predominant nationwide.

In Paraguay, Spanish and the indigenous Guaraní language are recognized as co-official at the national level and both are widely used in society.

Puerto Rico is an unincorporated territory of the U.S. where Spanish and English are the official languages and Spanish is the primary language.

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In November 2008 a district court judge ruled that a sequence of Congressional actions have had the cumulative effect of changing Puerto Rico's status to incorporated. However, by April 2011 the issue had not yet made its way through the courts, and in January 2013 the U.S. government still referred to Puerto Rico as unincorporated.

In Equatorial Guinea, the Spanish, French, and Portuguese languages all hold official status at the national level, though Spanish is the primary language in the public sphere and several Bantu languages are used at home and family settings.

Commonly used language

Though not an official language at the national level, Spanish is regularly spoken by significant minority populations in each of the nations and territories noted below.

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In each, public services and information are widely available in Spanish, as are various forms of printed and broadcast media.

Spanish has been spoken in the United States for several centuries, particularly in the Southwest and Florida, which were all once part of New Spain. Spanish is the most studied foreign language in United States schools and is spoken as a native tongue by 41 million people, plus an additional 11 million fluent second-language speakers.

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It is also de facto official in the U.S. state of New Mexico along with English and is increasingly used alongside English nationwide in business and politics. With over 50 million native speakers and second language speakers, the United States now has the second largest Spanish-speaking population in the world after Mexico. In the United States, it is regulated by the North American Academy of the Spanish Language.

The Spanish language is not official but also holds a special status (in the education system, the media, and some official documents) in the Principality of Andorra and the British Overseas Territory of Gibraltar, both of which share land borders with Spain.

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Spanish has no official recognition in the Central American nation of Belize, a Commonwealth realm where English is the official national language. However, the country shares land borders with Spanish-speaking Mexico and Guatemala and, per the 2000 Belizean census, Spanish is spoken by a sizable portion of the population there.

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Influences on the Spanish language

Spanish has also absorbed many loanwords from other Romance languages, notably from French, and in recent times also from English.

Much as English in the United States and Canada, it is now spoken by a host of people in the Americas, multicultural backgrounds including those of Amerindian and African heritage. spanish-training-institute-chennai The extensive contact between Spanish and the native American languages, has also deeply influenced not just local dialects of Spanish, but also the Spanish language as a whole.

Formative influences

As Spanish went through its first stages of development in Spain, it probably received influences from neighbouring related languages, among them Basque, which is a language isolate and thus completely unrelated to Spanish in origin. spanish-training-institute-chennai Umbrian and Oscan influences have also been postulated for the Roman colonization period.

Celtiberian influence

Two specific types of lenition, the voicing of voiceless consonants and the elision of voiced consonants, are the phonological changes of Spanish that are most often attributed to the influence of Celtic languages; they have also been attributed to the influence of the Basque language. While examples of these two types of lenition are ubiquitous and well-documented in Spanish, two assumptions need to be made if these two types of lenition are to be attributed to patterns of lenition in Celtic languages. The first assumption is that a population of bilingual Celtiberian–Vulgar Latin speakers existed long enough to have had an influence on the development of Old Spanish.

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The second assumption is that Continental Celtic, an extinct branch of Celtic, did indeed exhibit the types of lenition that are known to exist in modern Insular Celtic languages. The latter is simply not known, and it should also be noted that such lenitions are a very common kind of change in languages all around the world, and similar phenomena are found in Corsican and Sardinian where no Celtic causation is plausible. The Spanish development may therefore just be a natural internal process, not due to outside influence.

Basque influence

Many Castilians who took part in the Reconquista and later repopulation campaigns of Muslim Iberia were of Basque lineage and this is evidenced by many place names throughout Spain.

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The change from Latin 'f-' to Spanish 'h-' was once commonly ascribed to the influence of Basque speakers for a few reasons.

Gothic

Spain was controlled by the Visigoths between the 5th and 8th centuries. However, the influence of the Gothic language (an East Germanic language) on Spanish was minimal because the invaders were already somewhat Romanized, were secluded in the upper echelons of society, and generally did not intermarry with the natives.

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.

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Many of the Spanish words of Germanic origin were already present in Vulgar Latin, and so they are shared with other Romance languages.

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Geographical distribution

Spanish is the primary language of 20 countries worldwide. spanish-language-courses-in-chennai It is estimated that the combined total number of Spanish speakers is between 470 and 500 million, making it the second most widely spoken language in terms of native speakers.

Spanish is the second most spoken language by total number of speakers (after Mandarin). spanish-language-courses-in-chennai Internet usage statistics for 2007 show Spanish as the third most commonly used language on the Internet, after English and Mandarin.

Europe

In Europe, Spanish is an official language of Spain, the country after which it is named and from which it originated. It is widely spoken in Gibraltar, although English is the official, international language. It is also commonly spoken in Andorra, although Catalan is the official language.

Spanish is also spoken by small communities in other European countries, such as the United Kingdom, France, Italy, and Germany. Spanish is an official language of the European Union.

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In Switzerland, which had a massive influx of Spanish migrants in the 20th century, Spanish is the native language of 2.2% of the population.

The Americas

Hispanic America

Most Spanish speakers are in Hispanic America; of all countries with a majority of Spanish speakers, only Spain and Equatorial Guinea are outside the Americas. Nationally, Spanish is the official language—either de facto or de jure—of Argentina, Bolivia (co-official with Quechua, Aymara, Guarani, and 34 other languages), Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico (co-official with 63 indigenous languages), Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay (co-official with Guaraní), Peru (co-official with Quechua, Aymara, and "the other indigenous languages"), Puerto Rico (co-official with English), Uruguay, and Venezuela. Spanish has no official recognition in the former British colony of Belize; however, per the 2000 census, it is spoken by 43% of the population.

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Mainly, it is spoken by the descendants of Hispanics who have been in the region since the seventeenth century; however, English is the official language.

Due to their proximity to Spanish-speaking countries, Trinidad and Tobago and Brazil have implemented Spanish language teaching into their education systems. The Trinidad government launched the Spanish as a First Foreign Language (SAFFL) initiative in March 2005. In 2005, the National Congress of Brazil approved a bill, signed into law by the President, making it mandatory for schools to offer Spanish as an alternative foreign language course in both public and private secondary schools in Brazil. In many border towns and villages along Paraguay and Uruguay, a mixed language known as Portuñol is spoken.

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History

The Spanish language evolved from Vulgar Latin, which was brought to the Iberian Peninsula by the Romans during the Second Punic War, beginning in 210 BC. Previously, several pre-Roman languages (also called Paleohispanic languages)—unrelated to Latin, and some of them unrelated even to Indo-European—were spoken in the Iberian Peninsula. spanish-language-training-institute-in-chennai These languages included Basque (still spoken today), Iberian, Celtiberian and Celtic. Traces of Basque especially can be found in the Spanish vocabulary today, mainly in place names.

The first documents to show traces of what is today regarded as the precursor of modern Spanish are from the 9th century. Throughout the Middle Ages and into the modern era, the most important influences on the Spanish lexicon came from neighboring Romance languages—Navarro-Aragonese, Leonese, Catalan, Portuguese, Galician, Occitan, and later, French and Italian. Spanish also borrowed a considerable number of words from Basque and Arabic, as well as a minor influence from Germanic languages through the migration of tribes and a period of Visigoth rule in Iberia. spanish-language-training-institute-in-chennai In addition, many more words were borrowed from Latin through the influence of written language and the liturgical language of the Church.

According to the theories of Ramón Menéndez Pidal, local sociolects of Vulgar Latin evolved into Spanish, in the north of Iberia, in an area centered in the city of Burgos, and this dialect was later brought to the city of Toledo, where the written standard of Spanish was first developed, in the 13th century. In this formative stage, Spanish (Castilian) developed a strongly differing variant from its close cousin, Leonese, and, according to some authors, was distinguished by a heavy Basque influence.

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This distinctive dialect spread to southern Spain with the advance of the Reconquista, and meanwhile gathered a sizable lexical influence from the Arabic of Al-Andalus, much of it indirectly, through the Romance Mozarabic dialects (some 4,000 Arabic-derived words, make up around 8% of the language today). The written standard for this new language was developed in the cities of Toledo, in the 13th to 16th centuries, and Madrid, from the 1570s.

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Spanish language

Spanish (Listeni/ˈspænᵻʃ/, español), also called Castilian (Listeni/kæˈstɪliən/, About this sound castellano (help·info)), is a Romance language that originated in the Castile region of Spain and today has hundreds of millions of native-speakers across the world.

Spanish is a part of the Ibero-Romance group of languages, which evolved from several dialects of Vulgar Latin in Iberia after the collapse of the Western Roman Empire in the 5th century. spanish-classes-in-chennai The oldest Latin texts which show traces of Spanish come from mid-northern Iberia in the 9th century, and the first systematic written use of the language happened in Toledo, then capital of the Kingdom of Castile, in the 13th century. Beginning in the early 16th century, Spanish was taken to the colonies of the Spanish Empire, most notably to the Americas, as well as territories in Africa, Oceania and the Philippines.

Spanish vocabulary is thought to have been influenced from its beginnings by its contact with Basque and perhaps Germanic languages, as well as by neighboring Ibero-Romance languages, and later it absorbed many Arabic words during the Al-Andalus era in the Iberian Peninsula. spanish-classes-in-chennai It also adopted words from non-Iberian languages, particularly the Romance languages Occitan, French, Italian and Sardinian, as well as from Nahuatl and other Indigenous languages of the Americas.

Spanish is one of the six official languages of the United Nations.

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It is also used as an official language by the European Union, the Organization of American States, and the Union of South American Nations, and by many other international organizations.

Names of the language

In Spain and in some other parts of the Spanish-speaking world, Spanish is called castellano (Castilian) as well as español (Spanish), the language of the region of Castile, contrasting it with other languages spoken in Spain such as Galician, Basque and Catalan.

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The Spanish Constitution of 1978 uses the term castellano to define the official language of the whole Spanish State in contrast to las demás lenguas españolas (lit. "the other Spanish languages").

Castilian is the official Spanish language of the State. ... The other Spanish languages as well shall be official in their respective Autonomous Communities.

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The Spanish Royal Academy, on the other hand, currently uses the term español in its publications, but from 1713 to 1923 called the language castellano.

The Diccionario panhispánico de dudas (a language guide published by the Spanish Royal Academy) states that, although the Spanish Royal Academy prefers to use the term español in its publications when referring to the Spanish language, both terms—español and castellano—are regarded as synonymous and equally valid.

Two etymologies for español have been suggested.

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The Spanish Royal Academy Dictionary derives the term from the Provençal word espaignol, and that in turn from the Medieval Latin word Hispaniolus, 'from—or pertaining to—Hispania'. Other authorities attribute it to a supposed mediaeval Latin *hispaniōne, with the same meaning.

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