Essay On Spanish In English Language

Introduction

Spanish is the third most spoken language in the world after English and Mandarin; 400 million people worldwide speak it as their native tongue and over 500 million speak it as a second language (“Spanish Language,” 2010).

Language Family of Spanish

The Romance Languages

Spanish belongs to a family of languages called the “Romance” languages. The Romance languages, often called the “Latin Languages” are a family of languages that emerged in 6-9 AD. The most widely spoken Roman languages are Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese and Romanian. They are a continuation of a colloquial form of Latin, named “Vulgar Latin” which was spoken by soldiers and merchants. They differ from standard Latin as they use grammatical gender as opposed to Latin’s neuter gender and they lack Latin’s use of comparative inflections. The Romance languages evolved alongside the fall of the Western Roman Empire, resulting in “Latinisation” of all Roman controlled territory (“Spanish Language,” 2010).

Spanish as a Spoken Language

Geographic Location of Speakers

Spanish is the official language of Spain,

However in English this is not the case changing the sentence structure modifies the meaning. An example of this would be the sentence “The girls are tall”, in English it would be syntactically incorrect to say “Are tall the girls”. On the other hand, in Spanish, the sentence “Las chicas son altas” holds the same meaning as “Son altas las chicas”.

Another difference would be the use of double negatives; Spanish requires this to happen in some sentences, for example the sentence “He doesn’t want any candy” in English would not be correct if it contained a double negative, e.g. “He doesn’t want no candy”. Whereas, in Spanish this is considered normal and the sentence “Él no desea ningunos dulce” would be seen as grammatically