Paper about Spanish in U.S.
I'm typing a paper about Spanish in the United States. Can I just say español or do i have to refer to it as el español throughout that paper and if so does it need to be capitalized?
5 Answers
Dp, welcome to the forum, funny you should mention proper capitalization, as it is always required here. Please edit your title and your question. As for your question, español does not get capitalized unless it is the first word in the sentence.
If I am thinking correctly in the rules of capitalization.
If you are writing in Spanish you would not capitalize "español" unless it began a sentence. But when you do it would be " El español"
I apologize for my sloppy first message. I forgot to mention that the paper is about Spanish written in Spanish. One of my sentences is "Spanish is second most used language in the United States". Would I start off the sentence with Español or El Español?
The word español is Spanish, so not only do you not need to capitalize it, but you actually should never capitalize it unless it is at the beginning of a sentence.
And I can't imagine that anyone will care whether or not you include the article "el" where appropriate since, if it is in English, you're probably going to be using English articles like "the, a, and some."
Why are you wanting to use español instead of the word "Spanish?"
I will point out that you definitely should capitalize the United States.
I'm pretty sure Spanish is capitalized. It does not matter where it occurs in a sentence. It follows the same convention as the word, "English". English is my first language. My first language is English. English is capitalized in both instances, just like Spanish would be.
