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Spanish

Spanish, also called Castilian( castellano), is a Romance language that originated in Castile, a region in Spain. There are approximately 407 million people speaking Spanish as a native language, making it the second-most-spoken language by number of native speakers after Mandarin. It also has 60 million speakers as a second language, and 20 million students as a foreign language. Spanish is one of the six official languages of the United Nations, and is used as an official language by the European Union and Mercosur.

The Spanish Language is considered part of the Romance Languages group( languages originated from The Old Roman Empire). In 2007 the five most widely spoken Romance languages by number of native speakers were Spanish( 385 million), Portuguese( 210 million), French( 75 million), Italian( 60 million), and Romanian( 23 million). Many of these languages have large numbers of non-native speakers; this is especially the case for French, widespread throughout West Africa.

Romance languages are the continuation of Vulgar Latin, the popular and colloquial sociolect of Latin spoken by soldiers, settlers and merchants of the Roman Empire. It is distinguished from the Classical form of the language spoken by the Roman upper classes, the form in which the language was generally written. Between 350 BC and AD 150, the expansion of the Roman Empire, together with its administrative and educational policies, made Latin the dominant native language in continental Western Europe. Latin also exerted a strong influence in southeastern Britain, the Roman province of Africa, and the Balkans. During the Empire ' s decline, and after its fragmentation and collapse in the fifth century, varieties of Latin began to diverge within each local area at an accelerated rate, and eventually evolved into a continuum of recognizably different typologies.

Some examples of the similarities between Latin and Romance languages are listed below:

Spanish is the primary language of 20 countries worldwide. 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 third most spoken language by total number of speakers( after Mandarin and English).