It’s always an advantage when learning a new language to know a bit about its history and relevance in the modern world. Here are some interesting facts about the Spanish language:

1. Spanish and English are roughly tied for second place after Mandarin for the number of native speakers in the world at around 335-340 million individuals. Spanish accomplishes this in roughly half the number of countries as English, with 21 versus 42 in which Spanish and English are the official or co-official language.
2. The mother language of Spanish, and indeed all Romance languages, (i.e. Italian, Romanian, Spanish, Catalan) is Latin. Modern Spanish formed in the late 14th century in the region of Spain known as Castile. It is for this reason that Spanish may also be referred to as castellano.
3. Spanish has undergone far less changes than English in last 500 years. Therefore, fluent speakers of modern Spanish have little trouble reading the literature of Cervantes. Cervantes was the author of Don Quixote, arguably the first modern novel, and a contemporary of Shakespeare. English readers on the other hand generally need footnotes to interpret works by Shakespeare.
4. As English and Spanish are both Indo-European languages with a strong influence from Latin they share a lot of similar vocabulary allowing English speakers to learn Spanish with relative ease. Some of the largest differences between the two languages include: the existence of gender in Spanish for all nouns, Spanish having a more expansive number of verb tenses and the relatively common use of the subjunctive mood in the Spanish language.
5. While English has borrowed words in from numerous languages around the world it is Arabic that has had the greatest influence on Spanish, aside from Latin. Roughly 3000-4000 words have made their way into the Spanish language. Most of this occurred during the years between 711-1492 when Arabic people were in control of the greater part of the Iberian Peninsula, home to the countries of Portugal and Spain. Some of these words have also filtered down into the English language. For example, the Spanish word for cotton is algodón. Once you know that ‘al’ represents the word for ‘the’ in Arabic and isolate ‘godón’ you can start to see the connection to the word ‘cotton.’
6. While Spanish is originally from Spain, the number of native speakers in Latin America is now roughly 3 times that of modern-day Spain.  Minor differences between the languages are found in vocabulary and idiomatic expressions but there are also some major differences. First off, most speakers of Spain speak with a lisp forming the sound of ‘th’ when pronouncing the letter ‘z’ and the letter combinations ‘ce’ and ‘ci.’ (Much less commonly, some regions also lisp the letter ‘s’). Secondly, speakers in Spain distinguish between informality and formality when addressing more than one person at a time by using vosotros for informal “you all” and ustedes for the formal. In Latin America, the latter is used for both.

soleil (French), sol (Spanish), sole (Italian), sol (Portuguese), soare (Romanian)

Today there are more than 850 million native speakers worldwide of Romance languages. The six most widely spoken are Spanish with around 350 million native speakers, Portuguese with around 230 million native speakers, French with around 70 million native speakers in France and another 50 million 2nd-language speakers in former colonies throughout the world, Italian with around 64 million native speakers in Italy and 15 million in other countries, Romanian with around 24 million native speakers and Catalan, spoken on the eastern coast of Spain, with around 12 million native speakers.

Many of the major Romance languages have offshoots. For example, French has Occitan, Spanish has Galician and Italian has Sardinian to name but a few. As it is difficult at times to distinguish between a dialect and a distinct language, estimates of the number of Romance languages varies anywhere between two and four dozen. All of these languages are similar in vocabulary and grammar and once you speak one fluently you can learn others with relative ease. That said, some are more closely related than others. For example Spanish, Portuguese and Italian can at times be mutually intelligible whereas Romanian, which has been heavily influenced by its neighbouring Slavic languages, is quite different.

Romance languages, in particular French and Spanish, are among the most commonly studied second languages in the world. Though French does not hold the status it once did, it is still used as a lingua franca in many nations throughout the world especially in its former colonies in Africa and the Middle East.  Spanish is in third place worldwide for number of speakers, after English and Mandarin, and is one of the world’s most widespread languages as it is an official language in 21 nations.

For a map of Romance languages visit this link.