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.