SPANISH LANGUAGE

Spanish Espaol, Romance language spoken by more than 250,000,000 persons in Spain, the Americas, and Africa. The earliest written materials in Spanish, in the form of glosses on Latin texts, date from the 10th century, and works of literature in Spanish first appeared c. 1150. Spanish is also known (particularly in Latin America) as Castilian, after the dialect from which modern standard Spanish developed. That dialect arose in the 9th century around the town of Burgos, in north central Spain (Old Castile), and, as Spain was reconquered from the Moors, spread southward to central Spain (New Castile) around Madrid and Toledo by the 11th century. In the late 15th century the kingdoms of Castile and Leon merged with that of Aragon, and Castilian became the official language of all Spain. The regional dialects of Aragon, Navarre, Leon, Asturias, and Santander were crowded out gradually and today survive only in secluded rural areas. Galician, a Portuguese dialect spoken in northwestern Spain, was also much reduced. The dialect of Spanish used in Arab-occupied Spain prior to the 12th century was called Mozarabic (see Mozarabic language). A remarkably archaic form of Spanish with many borrowings from Arabic, it is known primarily from Mozarabic refrains (called kharjahs) added to Arabic and Hebrew poems. Outside the Iberian Peninsula, Spanish is spoken in virtually all of Central and South America except Brazil (where the closely related Portuguese language is spoken), as well as in the Canary Islands, parts of Morocco, and the Philippines. Latin-American Spanish has a number of regional dialects; all are derived from Castilian but differ in several points of phonology from European Spanish. Typical of Latin-American Spanish is the use of the s sound where Castilian has the lisplike th sound (z or c before e or i in spelling) and replacement of the Castilian ly sound (spelled ll) with a y sound or even with the zh sound of the z in English azure or the j in French jour. In Spanish the case system of Latin has been completely lost except for subject and object forms for pronouns. Nouns are marked for masculine or feminine gender, and plurals are marked by the addition of -s or -es; adjectives change endings to agree with nouns. The verb system is complex but by and large regular; it uses indicative, imperative, and subjunctive moods, preterite, imperfect, present, future, conditional, and a variety of perfect and progressive tenses, and passive and reflexive constructions.