History of Spanish Language

Did you know how many people in the world speak Spanish? Spanish is the native language of 332 million people in the world. Spanish is one of the Romance Languages in the Italic subfamily of the Indo-European language family. It has two major dialects: Andalusian and Castilian.

The Spanish language started in the Southwest region of Europe that is known as the Iberian Peninsula. Before the end of the 6th century BC first people of the region: the Iberians began to grouping with the Celts, people from central Europe. The two groups formed a people called the Celtiberians, speaking a language called Celtic.

This people later were named Hispania and they started to learn Latin from the Romans. These two languages were combined and called Vulgar Latin, which used words and phrases for the Latin language.

When the Visigoths took over Hispania Latin was the official language for that group. An Arabic group Moors joined the Hispania and started speaking Arabic and Arabic became the common language of that group except some other people who still spoke Vulgar Latin. Later the Vulgar Latin became the official Language by the Christian people.

The Vulgar Latin took a lot of words and phrases from the Arabic Language and formed a dialect called Mozarabic. The Castilian dialects of Spanish started in around the 13th century with King Alfonso x. Later the science, history and literature were translated into Castilian Spanish and it spread all over Spain. People from Spain continued to spread the Language to the countries they took over and the Spanish Language became an educational language.