Ten Facts About Spanish
I see a lot of questions on the forum, such as:
"Why should I learn Spanish?"
"Where did Spanish come from?"
"Are Castellano and Spanish the same thing?"
The following article may provide some basic answers:
With 329 million native speakers, Spanish ranks as the world's No. 2 language ... slightly ahead of English ... but far behind Chinese.
Spanish has at least 3 million native speakers each in 44 countries....
Spanish is part of the Indo-European family of languages, which are spoken by more than a third of the world's population.
....By the time Columbus came to the Western Hemisphere in 1492, Spanish had reached the point where the language as spoken and written would be easily understandable today.
5....Spanish is sometimes called español and sometimes castellano ... labels used vary from region to region and sometimes according to political viewpoint.
Spanish is one of the world's most phonetic languages. If you know how a word is spelled, you can almost always know how it is pronounced ....
The Royal Spanish Academy (Real Academia Española)...Among the language reforms promoted by the Academy have been the use of the inverted question mark and exclamation point (¿ and ¡).
Although Spanish originated on the Iberian Peninsula as a descendant of Latin, today it is has far more speakers in Latin America....
After Latin, the language that has had the biggest influence on Spanish is Arabic... Spanish has adopted hundreds of English words related to technology and culture.
Spanish and English share much of their vocabulary through cognates, as both languages derive many of their words from Latin and Arabic.
4 Answers
....By the time Columbus came to the Western Hemisphere in 1492, Spanish had reached the point where the language as spoken and written would be easily understandable today.
Does this mean that 1492 Spanish would be readily understood by 2011 people? I'm not sure about that. I sure as heck can't understand 1492 English (I'm thinking of Chaucer/Shakespeare era). Anyway who can prove me wrong? 
I love reading stats. Thanks Mariana.
It was a sad day when the word "golf" was accepted into Spanish: they should have stuck to Latin.
Fact #1 about Spanish: Spanish is the Best language in the universe!
Fact #2 about Spansih: Mexico, Nicaragua, Costa rica...are the best countries in the universe.
Fact #3 about Spanish: No one can disagree with what i just said, or about these three facts.
English actually has a few more speakers than Spanish... but not many.
