Spanish Language - History

History

The first documents regarded as precursors of modern Spanish are from the ninth century. The dialects reflected in those documents emerged from the ancestral Vulgar Latin (common Latin), which had been brought to Iberia by the Romans during the Second Punic War around 210 BC, absorbing influences from the native Iberian languages such as Celtiberian, Basque and other paleohispanic languages. Later, it gained other external influences, most notably from the Arabic of the later Al-Andalus period.

Local versions of Vulgar Latin evolved into Spanish in the central-north of Iberia, in an area defined by the then remote crossroad strips of Álava, Cantabria, Burgos, Soria and La Rioja, within the Kingdom of Castile (see Glosas Emilianenses). Several features from these dialects are thought to have been brought later to the city of Toledo, where the written standard of Spanish was first developed, in the 13th century. In this formative stage, Spanish (Castilian) developed a strongly differing variant from its close cousin, Leonese, and, according to some authors, was distinguished by a heavy Basque influence (see Iberian Romance languages). This distinctive dialect progressively spread south with the advance of the Reconquista, and so gathered a sizable lexical influence from Al-Andalus Arabic, especially in the later Medieval period. The written standard for this new language was developed in the cities of Toledo (13th to 16th centuries) and Madrid (from the 1570s).

The development of the Spanish sound system from that of Vulgar Latin exhibits most of the changes that are typical of Western Romance languages, including lenition of intervocalic consonants (thus Latin vīta > Spanish vida). The diphthongization of Latin stressed short e and o—which occurred in open syllables in French and Italian, but not at all in Catalan or Portuguese—is found in both open and closed syllables in Spanish, as shown in the following table:

Spanish is marked by the palatalization of the Latin double consonants nn and ll (thus Latin annum > Spanish año, and Latin anellum > Spanish anillo).

The consonant written ⟨u⟩ or ⟨v⟩ in Latin and pronounced in Classical Latin had probably "fortified" to a bilabial fricative /β/ in Vulgar Latin. In early Spanish (but not in Catalan or Portuguese) it merged with the consonant written ⟨b⟩ (a bilabial with plosive and fricative allophones). In modern Spanish, there is no difference between the pronunciation of orthographic ⟨b⟩ and ⟨v⟩.

Peculiar to Spanish (as well as to the neighboring Gascon dialect of Occitan, and sometimes attributed to a Basque substratum) was the mutation of Latin initial f- into h- whenever it was followed by a vowel that did not diphthongize. The h-, still preserved in spelling, is now silent in most varieties of the language, although in some Andalusian and Caribbean dialects it is still aspirated in some words. This is the reason why there are variants Fernando and Hernando (both Spanish of "Ferdinand"), and fierro and hierro (both Spanish of "iron").

Compare the examples in the following table:

Some consonant clusters of Latin also produced characteristically different results in these languages, as shown in the examples in the following table:

In the 15th and 16th centuries, Spanish underwent a dramatic change in the pronunciation of its sibilant consonants, known in Spanish as the reajuste de las sibilantes, which resulted in the distinctive velar pronunciation of the letter ⟨j⟩ and—in a large part of Spain—the characteristic interdental ("th-sound") for the letter ⟨z⟩ (and for ⟨c⟩ before ⟨e⟩ or ⟨i⟩). See History of Spanish (Modern development of the Old Spanish sibilants) for details.

The Gramática de la lengua castellana, written in Salamanca in 1492 by Elio Antonio de Nebrija, was the first grammar written for a modern European language. According to a popular anecdote, when Nebrija presented it to Queen Isabella I, she asked him what was the use of such a work, and he answered that language is the instrument of empire. In his introduction to the grammar, dated August 18, 1492, Nebrija wrote that "... language was always the companion of empire."

From the sixteenth century onwards, the language was taken to America and the Spanish East Indies via Spanish colonization of America. Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, author of Don Quixote, is such a well-known reference in the world that Spanish is often called la lengua de Cervantes ("the language of Cervantes").

In the twentieth century, Spanish was introduced to Equatorial Guinea and the Western Sahara, and to areas of the United States that had not been part of the Spanish Empire, such as Spanish Harlem in New York City. For details on borrowed words and other external influences upon Spanish, see Influences on the Spanish language.