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I love my native language and would like to share some interesting facts related to it for those of you who want to know a little bit more about our rich Spanish.
Spanish is the official tongue in Spain, Balearic Islands, and Canary Islands, as well as all the South American countries except Brazil and Guyana. It is also a common second language of some areas in the United States (Texas, Arizona, California, and Florida), parts of Morocco and even the west coast of Africa. Today, Spanish is the most widely spoken of the Romance languages, both in terms of number of speakers and the number of countries in which it is the dominant language. It is the mother tongue of some 320 million people scattered worldwide.
Regarding its origin, it is a Romance language (the roots are in Latin) which is an influence from the Moors who occupied Spain in the 7th century the regions to the north of Spain which had not been conquered during the Moorish invasion, saw the creation of Christian kingdoms which began to expand southwards and set the emancipation in motion.
Obviously, the Spanish spoken in all these countries appears with great variety. In fact the dissimilarities between Castilian Spanish and Latin American Spanish are correspondent to those between British English and American English.
The Roman alphabet is the one in use and the Spanish vocabulary comes from Latin, though many of the words clearly differ from their equivalents in French and Italian. Also, prolonged contact with Germanic and later Arabic affected its evolution but did not threaten a decline in Romance use. Germanic and Arabic have left their mark on the Spanish language as words like ‘guerra’ – war and ‘algebra’ – math can both be traced back to their respective Germanic and Arabic origins.
Paulina Torres De Witt
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