History of the Spanish language

The language known today as Spanish is derived from a dialect of spoken Latin that evolved in the north-central part of the Iberian Peninsula after the fall of the Western Roman Empire in the fifth century. A written standard was developed in the cities of Toledo (13th to 16th centuries) and Madrid (from the 1560s). Over the past 1,000 years, the language expanded south to the Mediterranean Sea, and was later transferred to the Spanish colonial empire, most notably to the Americas. Today it is the official language of 21 countries and of numerous international organizations. It is also one of the six official languages of the United Nations.

The development of Spanish phonology is distinguished from those of other nearby Romance languages (e.g. Portuguese, Catalan) by several features:

• diphthongization of Latin stressed short E and O in closed syllables as well as open (tiempo, puerta vs. Portuguese tempo, porta)
• devoicing and further development of the medieval Spanish sibilants, producing (1) the velar fricative [x] in words such as caja, hijo, gente, and (2)—in many dialects of Spain, including the prestige varieties of Madrid, Toledo, etc.—the interdental [θ] in words such as cinco, hacer, and lazo
• debuccalization and eventual loss of Latin initial /f/, marked in modern spelling by the silent ⟨h⟩ of words such as hablar, hilo, hoja (also in Gascon: hilh, huelha)
• early fricativization of palatal /ʎ/ (from Vulgar Latin -LY-, -CL-, -GL-), first into palatal /ʒ/ and ultimately into velar /x/, e.g., filiu →hijo, *oc'lu → ojo, *coag'lare → cuajar; cf. Portuguese filho, olho, coalhar)
• development of initial PL-, CL-, FL- into palatal /ʎ/, e.g., plorare → llorar, clamare → llamar, flamma → llama; cf. Portuguese chorar, chamar, chama, Catalan plorar, clamar, flama)
• Vulgar Latin initial /j/ (from J-, DY-, G(E)-, G(I)-) remains before /a/, /e/ and /i/, subsequently disappearing in an unstressed syllable (yace, yeso, helar, enero, echar, hinojo vs. Portuguese jaz, gesso, gelar, janeiro, jeitar, joelho)

The following features are characteristic of Spanish phonology and also of some other Ibero-Romance languages, but not the Romance languages as a whole:

• palatalization of Latin -NN- and -LL- into /ɲ/ and /ʎ/ (año, caballo) (also in Catalan: any, cavall).
• the phonemic merger of /b/ and /v/, making, for example, the noun tubo and the verb tuvo phonetically equivalent (in all contexts except those of hypercorrection or spelling pronunciation) (also in Galician, Northern European Portuguese and some Catalan and Occitan varieties)
• spirantization of /b/, /d/, and /g/ → [β̞], [ð̞] and [ɣ̞]—not only from original Latin B, D, and G (as in Sp. probar, sudar, legumbre), but also from Latin P, T, and C (as in Sp. sabe, vida, lago) (also in Galician, European Portuguese, Catalan and parts of Occitan)

The Latin system of four verb conjugations (form classes) is reduced to three in Spanish. The Latin infinitives with the endings -ĀRE, -ĒRE, and -ĪRE become Spanish infinitives in -ar, -er, and -ir respectively. The Latin third conjugation—infinitives ending in -ĔRE—are redistributed between the Spanish -er and -ir classes (e.g. facere → hacer, dicere → decir). Spanish verbal morphology continues the use of some Latin synthetic forms that were replaced by analytic ones in French and (partly) Italian (cf. Sp. lavó, Fr. il a lavé), and the Spanish subjunctive mood maintains separate present and past-tense forms.

Spanish syntax provides overt marking for some direct objects (the so-called "personal a", see differential object marking for the general phenomenon), and uses clitic doubling with indirect objects, in which a "redundant" pronoun (le, les) appears even in the presence of an explicit noun phrase. (Neither feature occurs in other Western Romance languages, but both are features of Romanian, with pe < PER corresponding to Spanish a.) With regard to subject pronouns, Spanish is a pro-drop language, meaning that the verb phrase can often stand alone without the use of a subject pronoun (or a subject noun phrase). Compared to other Romance languages, Spanish has a somewhat freer syntax with relatively fewer restrictions on subject-verb-object word order.

Due to prolonged language contact with other languages, the Spanish lexicon contains loanwords from Basque, Germanic, Arabic and indigenous languages of the Americas.

Accents—used in Modern Spanish to mark the vowel of the stressed syllable in words where stress is not predictable from rules—come into use sporadically in the 15th century, and massively in the 16th century. Their use begins to be standardized with the advent of the Spanish Royal Academy in the 18th century. See also Spanish orthography.

External history

The standard Spanish language is also called Castilian in its original variant and in order to distinguish with other languages native to parts of Spain, such as Galician, Catalan, Basque, etc. In its earliest documented form, and up through approximately the 15th century, the language is customarily called Old Spanish. From approximately the 16th century on, it is called Modern Spanish. Spanish of the 16th and 17th centuries is sometimes called "classical" Spanish, referring to the literary accomplishments of that period. Unlike English and French, it is not customary to speak of a "middle" stage in the development of Spanish. Castilian Spanish originated, after the decline of the Roman Empire, as a continuation of spoken Latin in the Cantabrian Mountains, in northern Spain, in the 8th and 9th centuries. With the Reconquista, this northern dialect spread to the south, where it almost entirely replaced or absorbed the provincial Romance dialects, at the same time as it borrowed many words from Moorish Arabic and was influenced by Mozarabic (the Romance speech of Christians living in Moorish territory) and medieval Judaeo-Spanish (Ladino). These languages had vanished in the Iberian Peninsula by the late 16th century.

The prestige of Old Castile and its language was propagated partly by the exploits of Castilian heroes in the battles of the Reconquista—among them Fernán González and Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar (El Cid)—and by the narrative poems about them that were recited in Castilian even outside the original territory of that dialect.

The "first written Spanish" was traditionally considered to have appeared in the Glosas Emilianenses. These are "glosses" (translations of isolated words and phrases in a form more like Hispanic Romance than Latin) added between the lines of a manuscript that was written earlier in Latin. Estimates of their date vary from the late 10th to the early 11th century. Today they are considered most probably Navarro-Aragonese.

The first steps toward standardization of written Castilian were taken in the 13th century by King Alfonso X of Castile, known as Alfonso el Sabio (Alfonso the Wise). He assembled scribes at his court and supervised their writing, in Castilian, of extensive works on history, astronomy, law, and other fields of knowledge.

Antonio de Nebrija wrote the first grammar of Spanish, Gramática de la lengua castellana, and presented it, in 1492, to Queen Isabella, who is said to have had an early appreciation of the usefulness of the language as a tool of hegemony, as if anticipating the empire that was about to be founded with the voyages of Columbus.

Because Old Spanish resembles the modern written language to a relatively high degree, a reader of Modern Spanish can learn to read medieval documents without much difficulty.

The Spanish Royal Academy was founded in 1713, largely with the purpose of standardizing the language. The Academy published its first dictionary in six volumes over the period 1726–1739, and its first grammar in 1771, and it continues to produce new editions of both from time to time. (The Academy's dictionary is now accessible on the Internet.) Today, each of the Spanish-speaking countries has an analogous language academy, and an Association of Spanish Language Academies was created in 1951.

Beginning in the 16th century, Spanish colonization brought the language to the Americas (Mexico, Central America, and western and southern South America), where it is spoken today, as well as to several island groups in the Pacific where it is no longer spoken by any large numbers of people: the Philippines, Palau, the Marianas (including Guam), and what is today the Federated States of Micronesia.

Use of the language in the Americas was continued by descendants of the Spaniards, both by Spanish criollos and by what had then become the mixed Spanish-Amerindian (mestizo) majority. After the wars of independence fought by these colonies in the 19th century, the new ruling elites extended their Spanish to the whole population to strengthen national unity, and nowadays it is the first and official language of the resulting republics, except in very isolated parts of the former Spanish colonies.

In the late 19th century, the still-Spanish colonies of Cuba and Puerto Rico encouraged more immigrants from Spain, and similarly other Spanish-speaking countries such as Argentina, Uruguay, and to a lesser extent Chile, Colombia, Mexico, Panama and Venezuela, attracted waves of European immigration, Spanish and non-Spanish, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. There, the countries' large (or sizable minority) population groups of second- and third-generation descendants adopted the Spanish language as part of their governments' official assimilation policies to include Europeans. In some countries, they had to be Catholics and agreed to take an oath of allegiance to their chosen nation's government.

When Puerto Rico became a possession of the United States as a consequence of the Spanish-American War, its population—almost entirely of Spanish and mixed Afro-Caribbean/Spanish (mulatto and mestizo) descent—retained its inherited Spanish language as a mother tongue, in co-existence with the American-imposed English as co-official. In the 20th century, more than a million Puerto Ricans migrated to the mainland U.S. (see Puerto Ricans in the United States).

A similar situation occurred in the American Southwest, including California, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas, where Spaniards, then criollos (Tejanos, Californios, etc.) followed by Chicanos (Mexican Americans) and later Mexican immigrants, kept the Spanish language alive before, during and after the American appropriation of those territories following the Mexican–American War. Spanish continues to be used by millions of citizens and immigrants to the United States from Spanish-speaking countries of the Americas (for example, many Cubans arrived in Miami, Florida, beginning with the Cuban Revolution in 1959, and followed by other Latin American groups; the local majority is now Spanish-speaking). Spanish is now treated as the country's "second language," and over 5 percent of the U.S. population are Spanish-speaking, but most Latino/Hispanic Americans are bilingual or also regularly speak English.

The presence of Spanish in Equatorial Guinea dates from the late 18th century, and it was adopted as the official language when independence was granted in 1968.

Spanish is widely spoken in Western Sahara, which was a protectorate/colony of Spain from the 1880s to the 1970s. It is also spoken in parts of the United States that had not been part of the Spanish Empire, such as Spanish Harlem in New York City, at first by immigrants from Puerto Rico, and later by other Spanish-speaking immigrants who arrived there in the late 20th century.

In 1492 Spain expelled its Jewish population. Their Judaeo-Spanish language, called Ladino, developed along its own lines and continues to be spoken by a dwindling number of speakers, mainly in Israel, Turkey, and Greece.

In the Marianas, the Spanish language was retained until the Pacific War, but is no longer spoken there by any significant number of people.

Language politics in Francoist Spain declared Spanish as the only official language in Spain, and to this day it is the most widely used language in government, business, public education, the workplace, cultural arts, and the media. But in the 1960s and 1970s, the Spanish parliament agreed to allow provinces to use, speak, and print official documents in three other languages: Catalan for Catalonia, Balearic Islands and Valencia; Basque for the Basque provinces and Navarre, and Galician for Galicia. Since 1975, following the death of Franco, Spain has become a multi-party democracy and decentralized country, constituted in autonomous communities. Under this system, some languages of Spain—such as Aranese (an Occitan language of northwestern Catalonia), Basque, Catalan/Valencian, and Galician—have gained co-official status in their respective geographical areas. Others—such as Aragonese, Asturian and Leonese—have been recognized by regional governments.

When the United Nations organization was founded in 1945, Spanish was designated one of its five official languages (along with Chinese, English, French, and Russian; a sixth language, Arabic, was added in 1973).

The list of Nobel laureates in Literature includes eleven authors who wrote in Spanish (José Echegaray, Jacinto Benavente, Gabriela Mistral, Juan Ramón Jiménez, Miguel Ángel Asturias, Pablo Neruda, Vicente Aleixandre, Gabriel García Márquez, Camilo José Cela, Octavio Paz, and Mario Vargas Llosa).

Influences

Main article: Influences on the Spanish language

The mention of "influences" on the Spanish language refers primarily to lexical borrowing. Throughout its history, Spanish has accepted loanwords, first from pre-Roman languages (including Basque, Iberian, and Celtiberian), and later from Greek, from Germanic languages, from the neighboring Romance languages, from Arabic, from Native American languages, and from English.

The most frequent word that entered Spanish from (or through) Basque is izquierda "left". Basque is perhaps most evident in some common Spanish surnames, including García and Echeverría. Basque place names also are prominent throughout Spain, because many Castilians who took part in the Reconquista and repopulation of Moorish Iberia by Christians were of Basque lineage. Iberian and Celtiberian likewise are thought to have contributed place names to Spain. Words of everyday use that are attributed to Celtic sources include camino "road", carro "cart", and cerveza "beer".

Influence of Basque phonology is credited by some researchers with softening the Spanish labiodentals: turning labiodental [v] to bilabial [β], and ultimately deleting labiodental [f]. Others negate or downplay Basque phonological influence, claiming that these changes occurred in the affected dialects wholly as a result of factors internal to the language, not outside influence. It is also possible that the two forces, internal and external, worked in concert and reinforced each other.

Some words of Greek origin were already present in the spoken Latin that became Spanish. Additionally, many Greek words formed part of the language of the Church. Spanish also borrowed Greek vocabulary in the areas of medical, technical, and scientific language, beginning as early as the 13th century.

The influence of Germanic languages is, by most accounts, very little on phonological development, but rather is found mainly in the Spanish lexicon. Words of Germanic origin are common in all varieties of Spanish. The modern words for the cardinal directions (norte, este, sur, oeste), for example, are all taken from Germanic words (compare north, east, south and west in Modern English), after the contact with Atlantic sailors. These words did not exist in Spanish prior to the 15th century. Instead, "north" and "south" were septentrion and meridion respectively (both virtually obsolete in Modern Spanish), while "east" was oriente (or levante), and "west" was occidente (or poniente). These older words for "east" and "west" continue to have some use in Modern Spanish.

In 711 Spain was invaded by Moors, who brought the Arabic language to the Peninsula. From then until the fall of the Emirate of Granada (1492), Spanish borrowed words from Arabic. It is thought that the bilingualism of the Mozarabs facilitated the transfer of vocabulary from Arabic to Castilian.

The neighboring Romance languages—Portuguese, Catalan, French, and Occitan—contributed greatly to the Spanish lexicon throughout the Middle Ages and into the modern era. Borrowing from Italian is most frequent in the 16th and 17th centuries, due largely to the influence of the Italian Renaissance.

With the development of the Spanish Empire in the New World came lexical borrowing from indigenous languages of the Americas, especially vocabulary dealing with flora, fauna, and cultural concepts unique to the Americas. Borrowing from English becomes especially strong in the 20th century, with words from many fields of activity, including sports, technology, and commerce.

The incorporation into Spanish of learned, or "bookish" words from its own ancestor language, Latin, is arguably another form of lexical borrowing. Throughout the Middle Ages and into the early modern period, most literate Spanish-speakers were also literate in Latin, and thus they easily adopted Latin words into their writing—and eventually speech—in Spanish.

Internal history

Spanish shares with other Romance languages most of the phonological and grammatical changes that characterized Vulgar Latin, such as the abandonment of distinctive vowel length, the loss of the case system for nouns, and the loss of deponent verbs.

Syncope

Syncope in the history of Spanish refers to the loss of an unstressed vowel from the syllable immediately preceding or following the stressed syllable. Early in its history, Spanish lost such vowels where they preceded or followed R or L, and between S and T.

Early syncope in Spanish

Environment	Latin words	Spanish words
_r	aperīre, humerum, litteram, operam	abrir, hombro, letra, obra
r_	eremum, viridem	yermo, verde
_l	acūculam, fabulam, insulam, populum	aguja, habla, isla, pueblo
l_	sōlitārium	soltero
s_t	positum, consūtūram	puesto, costura

*Solitario, which is derived from sōlitārium, is a learned word; cf. the alternate form soltero.

Later, after the time of intervocalic voicing, unstressed vowels were lost between other combinations of consonants:

Later syncope in Spanish

Environment	Latin words	Spanish words
b_t	cubitum, dēbitam, dūbitam	codo, deuda, duda
c_m, c_p, c_t	decimum, acceptōre, recitāre	diezmo, azor, rezar
d_c	undecim, vindicāre	once, vengar
f_c	advērificāre	averiguar
m_c, m_n, m_t	hāmiceolum, hominem, comitem	anzuelo, hombre, conde
n_c, n_t	dominicum, bonitāte, cuminitiāre	domingo, bondad, comenzar
p_t	capitālem, computāre, hospitālem	caudal, contar, hostal
s_c, s_n	quassicāre, rassicāre, asinum, fraxinum	cascar, rascar, asno, fresno
t_c, t_n	masticāre, portaticum, trīticum, retinam	mascar/masticar, portazgo, trigo, rienda

Words capital, computar, hospital, recitar and vindicar are learned words; cf. capitālem, computāre, hospitālem, recitāre, and vindicāre and alternate forms caudal, contar, hostal, rezar, and vengar.

Elision

While voiceless intervocalic consonants were often voiced, many voiced intervocalic stops (d, g, and occasionally b) were simply dropped from words altogether through a process called elision.

Examples of elision in Spanish

Consonant	Latin word	Spanish word
b → Ø	vendēbat	vendía
d → Ø	comedere, vidēre, cadēre, pede, quō modō	comer, ver, caer, pie, cómo
g → Ø	cōgitāre, digitum, legere, ligāre, lēgāle	cuidar, dedo, leer, liar, leal

Many forms with d and g preserved, e.g. ligar, legal, crudo, are learned words (latinisms); cf. the alternate forms liar, leal and Old Spanish cruo.

Voicing and spirantization

In virtually all the Western Romance languages, the Latin voiceless stops—/p/, /t/, and /k/, which are represented orthographically as P, T, and C respectively—where they occurred in an "intervocalic" environment (qualified below), underwent one, two, or three successive stages of lenition, from voicing to spirantization to, in some cases, elision (deletion). In Spanish these three consonants generally undergo both voicing and spirantization, resulting in voiced fricatives: [β], [ð], and [ɣ], respectively. This change is supposed to be affected by phonologies of Celtic languages and of Basque language, which were all bilingual with Vulgar Latin.

The phonological environment of these changes is not only between vowels but also after a vowel and before a sonorant consonant such as /r/ (Latin patrem > Spanish padre)—but not the reverse (Latin partem > Spanish parte, not *parde).

Examples of voicing and spirantization in Spanish

Consonants	Latin word	Spanish word
p → b [β]	aperīre, cooperīre, lupum, operam, populum, capram	abrir [aˈβrir], cubrir [kuˈβrir], lobo [ˈloβo], obra [ˈoβra], pueblo [ˈpweβlo], cabra [ˈkaβra]
t → d [ð]	cīvitātem, latum, mūtāre, scūtum, petram	ciudad [θjuˈðað], lado [ˈlaðo], mudar [muˈðar], escudo [esˈkuðo], piedra [ˈpjeðra]
c → g [ɣ]	focum, lacum, locum, pacāre, sacrātum	fuego [ˈfweɣo], lago [ˈlaɣo], luego [ˈlweɣo], pagar [paˈɣar], sagrado [saˈɣraðo]

The verb form digo is an interesting example as it shows different phonetic changes appearing in different verb forms. Notably, some forms of decir will feature the Latin /k/ to Spanish /θ/ change (which occurs when Latin /k/ is followed by /i/ or /e/), but in other verb forms /k/ is voiced and spirantized to /ɡ/. This also occurs in a few other Spanish verbs ending in -cer or -cir, as in the table below:

Forms with /k/ → /θ/			Forms with voicing of /k/ to /ɡ/
English	Latin	Spanish	English	Latin	Spanish
To say, to tell It says, it tells	dīcere /diːkere/ dīcet /diːket/	decir /deˈθiɾ/ dice /ˈdiθe/	I say, I tell May it tell	dīcō /diːkoː/ dīcat /diːkat/	digo /ˈdiɡo/ diga /ˈdiɡa/
To do, to make It does, it makes	facere /fakere/ facit /fakit/	hacer /aˈθeɾ/ hace /ˈaθe/	I do, I make May it make	faciō > *facō /fakoː/ faciat > *facat /fakat/	hago /ˈaɡo/ haga /ˈaɡa/

Diphthongization in open and closed syllables

The stressed short E and O of Latin undergo diphthongization in many of the Western Romance languages. In Spanish this change occurs regardless of syllable shape (open or closed), in contrast to French and Italian, where it takes place only in open syllables, and in greater contrast to Catalan and Portuguese—neighboring languages on the Iberian Peninsula—where this diphthongization does not occur at all. As a result, Spanish phonology exhibits a five-vowel system, not the seven-vowel system that is typical of most other Western Romance languages.

Spanish diphthongization in open and closed syllables

Syllable shape	Latin	Spanish	French	Italian	Portuguese	Catalan
Open	petra, focus	piedra, fuego	pierre, feu	pietra, fuoco	pedra, fogo	pedra, foc
Closed	festa, porta	fiesta, puerta	fête, porte	festa, porta	festa, porta	festa, porta

Learned words and consonant cluster simplification

Learned words—that is, "bookish" words transmitted partly through writing and thus affected by their Latin form—became increasingly frequent with the works of Alfonso X in the mid-to-late 13th century. Many of these words contained consonant clusters which, in oral transmission, had been reduced to simpler consonant clusters or single consonants in previous centuries. This same process affected many of these new, more academic, words, especially when the words extended into popular usage in the Old Spanish period. Some of the consonant clusters affected were -ct-, -ct[i]-, -pt-, -gn-, -mn-, -mpt-, and -nct-. Most of the simplified forms have since reverted to the learned forms or are now considered to be uneducated.

Reduction of consonant clusters

Consonant cluster	Latin form	Learned form	Old Spanish form	Modern Spanish form
ct → t	effectum, perfectum, respectum, sectam	efecto, perfecto, respecto, secta	efeto, perfeto, respeto, seta	efecto, perfecto, respeto/respecto, secta
ct[i] → cc[i] → c[i]	affectiōnem, lectiōnem, perfectiōnem	affección, lección, perfección	afición, lición, perfeción	afición/afección, lección, perfección
pt → t	acceptāre, baptismum, conceptum	aceptar, baptismo, concepto	acetar, bautismo, conceto	aceptar, bautismo, concepto
gn → n	dignum, magnificum, significāre	digno, magnífico, significar	dino, manífico, sinificar	digno, magnífico, significar
mn → n	columnam, solemnitātem	columna, solemnidad	coluna, solenidad	columna, solemnidad
mpt → nt	promptum, exemptum	prompto, exempto	pronto, exento	pronto, exento
nct → nt	sanctus	sancto	sancto	santo

Most of these words have modern forms which more closely resemble Latin than Old Spanish. In Old Spanish, the simplified forms were acceptable forms which were in coexistence (and sometimes competition) with the learned forms. The Spanish educational system, and later the Real Academia Española, with their demand that all consonants of a word be pronounced, steadily drove most simplified forms from existence. Many of the simplified forms were used in literary works in the Middle Ages and Renaissance (sometimes intentionally as an archaism), but have since been relegated mostly to popular and uneducated speech. Occasionally, both forms exist in Modern Spanish with different nuances of meaning or in idiomatic usage. afición is a 'fondness of' or 'taste for' while afección is 'illness.' Modern Spanish respeto is 'respect' while con respecto a means 'with regard to.'

Vocalization

The term "vocalization" refers to the change from a consonant to the vowel-like sound of a glide. Some syllable-final consonants, regardless of whether they were already syllable-final in Latin or brought into that position by syncope, became glides. Labials (b, p) yielded the rounded glide [w] (which was in turn absorbed by a preceding round vowel), while the velar c ([k]) produced the palatal glide [j] (which could palatalize a following [t] and be absorbed by the resulting palatal affricate). (The forms debda, cobdo, and dubdar are documented in Old Spanish; but the hypothetical forms *oito and *noite had already given way to ocho and noche by the time Castilian became a written language.)

Syllable-final vocalization

Change	Latin word	Intermediate form	Spanish word
p → w	baptistam	—	bautista
b → w	dēbitam	debda	deuda
b → w → Ø	cubitum, dubitāre	cobdo, dubdar	codo, dudar
ct → ch	octō, noctem	*oito, *noite	ocho, noche

Merger of /b/ and /v/

Most Romance languages have maintained the distinction between a phoneme /b/ and a phoneme /v/—a voiced bilabial stop and a voiced, usually labiodental fricative, respectively. Instances of the /b/ phoneme could be inherited directly from Latin /b/ (when not between vowels), or they could result from the voicing of Latin /p/ between vowels. The /v/ phoneme was generally derived either from Latin /b/ between vowels, or from the Latin phoneme corresponding to the letter ⟨v⟩ and pronounced [w] in Classical Latin (but later "fortified" to fricative consonant status). In most regions, /v/ had labiodental articulation, but in Old Spanish (which still distinguished /b/ and /v/), /v/ was actually a bilabial fricative [β]. (An oft-cited Latin pun, Beati Hispani quibus vivere bibere est, i.e. "Blessed (are the) Spaniards, for whom to live is to drink", which would prove the early confusion of 'v' and 'b' in Spain, seems to be in fact not from Roman times but from the Middle Ages or even the Renaissance. The saying has other versions, like Beati Hispani, dum bibere dicunt vivere.) The similarity between the stop [b] and fricative [β] resulted in them merging entirely by the end of the Old Spanish period. In Modern Spanish orthography the letters ⟨b⟩ and ⟨v⟩ represent the same phoneme, usually transcribed as /b/—which is generally realized as the fricative [β] except when utterance-initial or after a nasal consonant, in which cases it is realized as the stop [b]. The choice of orthographic ⟨b⟩ or ⟨v⟩ depends mainly on the etymology of the word, and attempts to mimic the Latin spelling of the word rather than continue the Old Spanish pronunciation. (Hence Old Spanish bever "to drink", bivir/vivir "to live" become beber, vivir, respectively, following the Latin spelling bibere, vīvere.)

Latin f- to Spanish h-

F was almost always initial in Latin words, and most of these words came to be written with initial ⟨h⟩ in Spanish, now for the most part silent. It is thought that the letter ⟨f⟩ originally represented the labiodental [f] in Latin, and that through a series of "softening" changes became, successively, bilabial [ɸ] and then glottal [h] (hence the modern spelling), before being lost altogether in most varieties; /h/ is completely silent in Vulgar Latin. The first written record of the process dates from 863, when the Latin name Forticius was written as Ortiço, which might have been pronounced with initial /h/ but certainly not /f/. (The same name appears as Hortiço in a document dated 927.) The replacement of ⟨f⟩ by ⟨h⟩ in spelling is not frequent before the 16th century; however, this is thought not to reflect preservation of /f/. Rather, ⟨f⟩ was consistently used to represent /h/ until the phoneme /f/ reappeared in the language (around the 16th century, as a result of borrowings from Classical Latin), at which point it was necessary to distinguish the two in spelling.

The change from /f/ to /h/ occurred historically in the Romance speech of Old Castile and Gascon, but nowhere else nearby. Since these are both areas which were historically bilingual with Basque, and Basque historically had [h] but no [f], it is often suggested that this change is due to Basque influence. However, this is contested by many linguists.

Most current instances of ⟨f⟩ are either learned words (i.e. words influenced by their written Latin form, such as forma, falso, fama, feria), loanwords of Arabic origin, or words whose initial ⟨f⟩ in Old Spanish is followed by a non-vowel—⟨r⟩, ⟨l⟩, or the glide element of a diphthong—as in frente, flor, fiesta, fuerte. This is the reason why there are modern spelling variants Fernando and Hernando (both Spanish of "Ferdinand"), ferrero and herrero (both Spanish of "smith"), fierro and hierro (both Spanish of "iron"), and fondo and hondo (both Spanish of "deep", but fondo means "depth" while hondo means "deep"); hacer (Spanish of "to make") is the root word of satisfacer (Spanish of "to satisfy"), and hecho ("made") is the root word of satisfecho (Spanish of "satisfied").

Examples of Latin 'f-' to Spanish 'h-'

Consonants	Latin word	Spanish word
f- → h-	fabulāri, facere, faciendam, factum, faminem, farīnam, fēminam, fīcatum, fīlium, foliam, fōrmōsum, fūmum, fungum, furcam	hablar, hacer, hacienda, hecho, hambre, harina, hembra, hígado, hijo, hoja, hermoso, humo, hongo, horca

Modern development of the Old Spanish sibilants

During the 16th century, the three voiced sibilant phonemes—dental /d͡z/, apico-alveolar /z/, and palato-alveolar /ʒ/ (as in Old Spanish fazer, casa, and ojo, respectively) lost their voicing and merged with their voiceless counterparts: /t͡s/, /s/, and /ʃ/ (as in caçar, passar, and baxar respectively. The character ⟨ç⟩, called ⟨c⟩ cedilla, originated in Old Spanish, but has been replaced by ⟨z⟩ in the modern language.

Additionally, the affricate /t͡s/ lost its stop component, to become a laminodental fricative, [s̪]. As a result, the sound system then contained two sibilant fricative phonemes whose contrast depended entirely on a subtle distinction between their places of articulation: apicoalveolar, in the case of the /s/, and laminodental, in the case of the new fricative sibilant /s̪/ derived from the affricate /t͡s/. The distinction between these sounds was widened in the dialects of northern and central Spain by paradigmatic dissimilation, while those of Andalusia and the Americas merged the two sounds.

The dissimilation in the northern and central dialects occurred with the laminodental fricative moving forward to an interdental place of articulation, losing its sibilancy to become [θ]. This sound is represented in modern spelling by ⟨c⟩ before ⟨e⟩ or ⟨i⟩, and by ⟨z⟩ elsewhere. In the south of Spain and the Americas, the /s/ and /s̪/ phonemes merged, with the new phoneme being pronounced either as [s] ("seseo"—in the Americas and parts of Andalusia) or as [θ] ("ceceo"—in a few parts of Andalusia). In general, coastal regions of Andalusia preferred [θ], while more inland regions preferred [s] (see the map at ceceo). During the colonization of the Americas, most of the settlers came from the south of Spain; as a result, language historians believe, the great majority of the Spanish-speaking New World today speaks a language variety derived largely from the language of Andalusia.

Meanwhile the alveopalatal fricative /ʃ/—the result of the merger of voiceless /ʃ/ (spelled ⟨x⟩ in Old Spanish) with voiced /ʒ/ (spelled with ⟨j⟩ in some words, and in others with ⟨g⟩ before ⟨e⟩ or ⟨i⟩)—was moved rearward in all dialects, becoming (depending on geographical variety) velar [x], uvular [χ] (in parts of Spain), or glottal [h] (in Andalusia and parts of the Americas, especially the Caribbean region).

Interchange of the liquids /l/ and /r/

One unusual feature of Spanish etymology is the way in which the liquids /r/ and /l/ have sometimes replaced each other in words derived from Latin, French and other sources. For example, Spanish milagro, "miracle", is derived from Latin miraculum. More rarely, this process has involved nasals such as /n/ (as in alma, from Latin anima). Here is an incomplete list of such words:

• ancla, "anchor", Latin ancora
• albedrío, "will, whim, fancy", Latin arbitrium, "judgment, decision, will"
• algalia, "catheter", Greek ergeleia, "instrument"
• alimaña, "pest", Latin, animalĭa, "animals"
• alma, "soul", Latin anima
• alondra, "lark", Latin alaudula
• árbol, "tree", Latin arbor
• Argelia, "Algeria (nation)"
• azul, "blue", Arabic lazawárd, cf. Latin azura, French azure
• blandir, "to brandish", French brandir
• bolsa, "bag, purse", Latin bursa
• cárcel, "prison", Latin carcer (cf. English "incarcerate")
• calambre, "cramp, electric shock", French crampe
• Catalina, Latin Catharina (proper name)
• cilantro, "coriander", Latin coriandrum
• cimbrar, "shake (a stick), sway, swish", Latin cymula, "sprout, shoot (of plant)"
• coronel, "colonel", French colonel, from Italian colonnello
• Cristóbal, Germanic Christoffer, from Latin Christopherus (proper name)
• escolta, "escort", Italian scorta
• espuela, "spur", Gothic *spaúra (cf. French éperon)
• flete, "freight, cargo", French fret
• fraile, "friar", Provençal fraire, from Latin frater, "brother"
• franela, "flannel", French flanelle
• frasco, "flask", Germanic flasko
• guirnalda, "garland", older Spanish guirlanda, cf. French guirlande
• golondrina, "swallow (bird)", Latin hirundo
• lirio, "lily, iris", Latin lilium
• mármol, "marble", Latin marmor
• miércoles, "Wednesday", Latin Mercuri [dies], "Mercury's [day]"
• milagro, "miracle", Latin miraculum
• papel, "paper", Catalan paper, Latin papyrus
• palabra, "word", Latin parabola
• peligro, "danger", Latin periculum (cf. English "peril")
• plática, "chat, conversation", Latin practica
• quilate, "carat", Arabic qirat (cf. Italian carato)
• recluta, "recruit", French recrute
• regaliz(a), "licorice", Late Latin liquiritia
• roble, "oak", Latin robur, "strong"
• surco, "groove, furrow", Latin sulcus
• taladro, "drill", Celto-Latin tarātrum
• temple, "temperature, temper, mood", Latin tempus, -oris, "time, due season"
• tiniebla(s), "darkness", Latin tenebrae

Yeísmo

Documents from as early as the 15th century show occasional evidence of sporadic confusion between the phoneme /ʝ/ (generally spelled ⟨y⟩) and the palatal lateral /ʎ/ (spelled ⟨ll⟩). Although the distinction is maintained in spelling, in most dialects of Modern Spanish, the two have merged into the same, non-lateral palatal sound. Thus, for example, most Spanish speakers have the same pronunciation for haya (from the verb haber) as for halla (from hallar). This phonemic merger is called yeísmo, based on one name for the letter ⟨y⟩.

For a long time, this was known as a specifically Andalusian trait, and only seems to have reached Madrid and other cities of central and northern Spain in the last 100 years or so. Since more than half of the early settlers of Spanish America came from Andalusia, most Spanish-speaking regions of the Americas have yeísmo, although there are pockets where the sounds are still distinguished. People whose native language is not Spanish, such as Portuguese, Galician, Astur-Leonese, Basque, Aragonese, Occitan and Catalan speakers, usually do not feature yeísmo (since these languages historically–and actually–do retain the /ʎ/ phoneme distinguished).

A related trait which has also been documented sporadically for several hundred years is rehilamiento (literally "whizzing"), the pronunciation of /ʝ/ as a sibilant fricative [ʒ] or even an affricate [dʒ], which is also common among non-native Spanish speakers. (The same sound occurs in Judaeo-Spanish, but in a different context: Judaeo-Spanish preserves the old pronunciation of "j", for example in "hijo", where modern Spanish has [x]). The current pronunciation varies greatly depending on the geographical dialect and sociolect (with [dʒ], especially, stigmatized except at the beginning of a word). Rioplatense Spanish (of Argentina and Uruguay) is particularly known for the pronunciation [ʒ] of both /ʝ/ and original /ʎ/. Within the last 50 years or so, however, the unvoiced pronunciation [ʃ] has become dominant in the Argentine capital of Buenos Aires, and is spreading outward due to the prestige associated with the capital city.

See also

• Cantar de Mio Cid
• Iberian language
• Iberian Romance languages
• Influences on the Spanish language
• List of Spanish words of Indigenous American Indian origin
• List of Spanish words of Philippine origin
• List of English words of Spanish origin
• Romance languages
• Spanish dialects and varieties
• Spanish phonology
• Old Spanish language
• Middle Spanish
• Vulgar Latin
• Rafael Lapesa

References

• Boyd-Bowman, Peter (1964), Índice geobiográfico de cuarenta mil pobladores españoles de América en el siglo XVI (Vol. I), Bogotá: Instituto Caro y Cuervo
• Corominas, Joan (1973), Breve diccionario etimológico de la lengua castellana, Madrid: Gredos
• Erichsen, Gerald (n.d.), "Spain's Linguistic Diversity" {{citation}}: External link in |title= (help)CS1 maint: year (link)
• Hammond, Robert M. (2001), The Sounds of Spanish: Analysis and Application (with Special Reference to American English), Somerville, Massachusetts: Cascadilla Press, ISBN 1-57473-018-5
• Lapesa, Rafael (1942/1981), Historia de la lengua española (9th ed.), Madrid: Gredos, ISBN 84-249-0072-3, ISBN 84-249-0073-1 {{citation}}: Check date values in: |year= (help)CS1 maint: year (link)
• Lathrop, Thomas A. (2003), The Evolution of Spanish, Newark, Delaware: Juan de la Cuesta, ISBN 1-58977-014-5
• Lloyd, Paul M. (1987), From Latin to Spanish, Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society (Memoirs, Vol. 173), ISBN 0-87169-173-6 {{citation}}: Italic or bold markup not allowed in: |publisher= (help)
• Navarro Tomás, Tomás (1918/1982), Manual de pronunciación española (21st ed.), Madrid: Concejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, ISBN 84-00-03462-7 {{citation}}: Check date values in: |year= (help)CS1 maint: year (link)
• Ostler, Nicholas (2005), Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World, New York: HarperCollins, ISBN 0-06-621086-0
• Penny, Ralph (2002), A History of the Spanish Language, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ISBN 978-0-521-01184-6, ISBN 0-521-01184-1
• Spaulding, Robert K[ilburn] (1943/1971), How Spanish Grew, Berkeley: University of California Press, ISBN 0-520-01193-7 {{citation}}: Check date values in: |year= (help)CS1 maint: year (link)

External links

• An explanation of the development of Medieval Spanish sibilants in Castile and Andalusia.
• A recording of the sibilants, as they would have been pronounced in medieval Spanish.
• A History of the Spanish language (sample from the second edition, 2002), by Ralph Penny
• Linguistic Time Machine Check the historic evolution of Latin words to modern Spanish.