A brief history of Spanish - Ilan Stavans
Beginning in the 3rd century,
before the coming era,
the Romans conquered
the Iberian Peninsula.
This period gave rise to several regional
languages in the area that's now Spain,
including Castilian, Catalan and Galician.
One of these would become Spanish—
but not for another 1,500 years.
Those years tell the origin story
of what’s become a global modern language.
During the Roman occupation,
colloquial spoken Latin,
often called “Vulgar Latin,”
mixed with Indigenous languages.
Approximately 75% of modern Spanish comes
from Latin, including syntactic rules.
For instance, verbs are conjugated
in a similar way as in Latin.
And like other Roman languages,
nouns have gender:
el sol, the sun, is masculine,
whereas la luna, the moon, is feminine.
After the Roman Empire collapsed,
a series of other powers conquered
the region.
First came the Visigoths starting
in the 5th century of the common era.
They spoke an eastern Germanic language
that would eventually become
part of German
and lent a few words to the language
that would become Spanish.
Then the Umayyad Caliphate
ousted the Visigoths.
They spoke Arabic, which left
a strong mark on modern Spanish:
over a thousand words come from Arabic.
These often have a starting
“a” or “z” sound,
and sometimes include an “h.”
In 1492, the Catholic Church consolidated
its power through two monarchs,
Isabella and Ferdinand,
expelling Muslims and Jews,
combining the distinct regional kingdoms
into one nation,
and adopting one of the local languages
as the official state language.
That language was Castellano,
or Castilian, from the Kingdom of Castile,
which was centrally located in Spain
and home to Madrid.
Thereafter Castellano became Español,
or Spanish.
But the Spanish of 1492 was Old Spanish,
very different from Spanish today.
That same year, Christopher Columbus
sailed across the Atlantic Ocean,
marking the start of the Spanish conquest
of the Americas.
The Indigenous population of the Americas
spoke an estimated
2,000 different languages.
Over the next few decades,
most of them were forced to adopt Spanish
at the expense of their own languages.
Still, words from Indigenous languages
became part of Spanish.
From Nahuatl,
the language of the Aztec Empire,
came words with “ch” and “y”
like “chapulin” and “coyote.”
From Quechua,
a language spoken in the Peruvian Andes,
came words with “ch”
like “cancha,” “chullo,” and “poncho.”
Some of these words describe things
that hadn’t existed in the Spanish lexicon
before,
while others replaced existing
Spanish words even in Spain.
By the time Miguel de Cervantes published
the first part of “Don Quixote” in 1605,
the language was arguably more similar
to modern Spanish
than plays of one of his contemporaries,
William Shakespeare,
were to modern English.
Starting in the 18th century,
French language and culture were
extremely fashionable in Spain,
and later Hispanic America.
While the two languages already had
commonalities
from their shared roots in Latin,
Spanish gained new words from French
during this period.
In the 19th century,
all over Central and South America,
people revolted to gain independence
from Spain.
In the newly sovereign nations,
people continued to speak the language
of their former oppressors.
Today, there are approximately 415 million
inhabitants of Hispanic America.
Spanish is the official language
of 21 countries and Puerto Rico.
As of 2021, only English, Mandarin,
and Hindi have more speakers.
How does a language with so many
speakers around the world
not break apart into new languages
the way Vulgar Latin did?
There's no easy answer to this question.
Other languages that spread
through colonialism, like French,
have mixed with Indigenous languages
to form entirely new ones.
Some would argue that Spanglish,
a mixture of Spanish and English,
is a distinct language
or on its way to becoming one.
But although a person in Buenos Aires
occasionally might use words
that aren’t fully intelligible to someone
in Bogotá or Mexico City,
Spanish retains enough unity
of syntax, grammar, and vocabulary
to remain one language.
