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Español ┃ Spanish ▢𓏺｜Definition｜1st｜20260117142043-00-⌔

Spanish language - Wikipedia

Spanish language

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Spanish (español) or Castilian (castellano) is a Romance language of the Indo-European language family that evolved from the Vulgar Latin spoken on the Iberian Peninsula of Europe. It originated in the Kingdom of Castile, a historical kingdom in north-central Spain.1 Today, it is a global language with 519 million native speakers, mainly in the Americas and Spain, and about 636 million speakers total, including second-language speakers. Spanish is the official language of 21 countries, as well as one of the six official languages of the United Nations.23 Spanish is the world’s second-most spoken native language after Mandarin Chinese;45 the world’s fourth-most spoken language overall after English, Mandarin Chinese, and Hindustani (Hindi - Urdu); and the world’s most widely spoken Romance language. The country with the largest population of native speakers is Mexico.6

Spanish is part of the Ibero-Romance language group, which evolved from several dialects of Vulgar Latin in Iberia after the collapse of the Western Roman Empire in the 5th century. The oldest Latin texts with traces of Spanish come from mid-northern Iberia in the 9th century,7 and the first systematic written use of the language happened in Toledo, a prominent city of the Kingdom of Castile, in the 13th century. Spanish colonialism in the early modern period spurred the introduction of the language to overseas locations, most notably to the Americas.8

As a Romance language, Spanish is a descendant of Latin. About 75% of modern Spanish vocabulary is Latin in origin, including Latin borrowings from Ancient Greek.9 Alongside English and French, it is also one of the most taught foreign languages throughout the world.10 Spanish is well represented in the humanities and social sciences.11 Spanish is also the third most used language on the internet by number of users after English and Chinese12 and the second most used language by number of websites after English.13

Spanish is used as an official language by many international organizations, including the United Nations, European Union, Organization of Ibero-American States, Organization of American States, Union of South American Nations, Community of Latin American and Caribbean States, African Union, and others.2

Printed 2026-06-28.

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Footnotes

  1. “Castellano” [Castilian]. Ministerio de Cultura y Deporte (in Spanish). Gobierno de España. Retrieved 11 November 2025. Its origins lie in the northern third of the Iberian Peninsula, in the Kingdom of Castile, where other dialects of Latin intermingled, such as Galician–Portuguese, Astur–Leonese, and Navarro–Aragonese. ↩

  2. “Official Languages”. United Nations. Archived from the original on 5 January 2024. Retrieved 5 January 2024. ↩ ↩2

  3. “In which countries of the world is this language spoken?”. Archived from the original on 29 June 2023. Retrieved 23 January 2024. ↩

  4. Eberhard, David M.; Simons, Gary F.; Fennig, Charles D. (2022). “Summary by language size”. Ethnologue. SIL International. Archived from the original on 18 June 2023. Retrieved 2 December 2023. ↩

  5. Salvador, Yolanda Mancebo (2002). “Hacia una historia de la puesta en escena de La vida es sueño”. Calderón en Europa (in Spanish). Vervuert Verlagsgesellschaft. pp. 91–100. doi:10.31819/9783964565013-007. ISBN 978-3-96456-501-3. Archived from the original on 3 March 2022. Retrieved 3 March 2022. ↩

  6. “Countries with most Spanish speakers 2021”. Statista. Archived from the original on 17 May 2022. Retrieved 17 May 2022. ↩

  7. Vergaz, Miguel A. (7 November 2010). “La RAE avala que Burgos acoge las primeras palabras escritas en castellano”. El Mundo (in European Spanish). Archived from the original on 24 November 2010. Retrieved 24 November 2010. ↩

  8. Rice, John (2010). “sejours linguistiques en Espagne”. sejours-linguistiques-en-espagne.com. Archived from the original on 18 January 2013. Retrieved 3 March 2022. ↩

  9. Comparán Rizo, Juan José. Raices Griegas y latinas (in Spanish). Ediciones Umbral. p. 17. ISBN 978-968-5430-01-2. Retrieved 22 August 2017. ↩

  10. Spanish in the World Archived 6 February 2021 at the Wayback Machine, Language Magazine, 18 November 2019. ↩

  11. “El español se atasca como lengua científica”. Servicio de Información y Noticias Científicas (in Spanish). 5 March 2014. Archived from the original on 22 February 2019. Retrieved 29 January 2019. ↩

  12. Devlin, Thomas Moore (30 January 2019). “What Are The Most-Used Languages On The Internet?”. +Babbel Magazine. Archived from the original on 6 December 2021. Retrieved 13 July 2021. ↩

  13. “Usage statistics of content languages for websites”. 10 February 2024. Archived from the original on 17 August 2019. Retrieved 10 February 2024. ↩

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