A LITTLE BIT OF HISTORY: Spanish Origin.

Spanish is a language derived from Latin. When the Roman Empire fell, the Latin started fragmenting to the Romance languages, the languages that derived from Latin.

Spanish was the language spoken in the area of the castles in High Ebro (Castilla la Vieja). Spanish is the result of the linguistic integration of speakers from different backgrounds (people from: Cantabria, La Rioja, País Vasco, mozarabics…)

The Castilian County acquires the status of Kingdom in 1035 with Fernando I. The Castilian kings continue with the Reconquest (Reconquista) and Spanish was moving in mainland.

New literary genres appear, to reflect courtly and chivalric ideals, from feudal aristocracy and other social groups. The first words written in Spanish were sermon notes. Then literary works started to be written in Spanish, and so Spanish began to be a culture language. First important literary texts like “El libro del Buen Amor” Arcipreste de Hita or “La Celestina” Fernando de Rojas.

Cristóbal Colon introduces Spanish in South America when he get there for the conquest in 1492. In the same year, Antonio de Nebrija writes the first book for Spanish Grammatik “Gramática Castellana”.

Mid thirteenth century, Alfonso X El Sabio (sage), was responsible for setting the rules for Spanish grammar. He also founded and directed la Escuela de Traductores de Toledo (Toledo school of translators) where treaties and texts in other languages were translated in Spanish.

XVI century was the Gold century of Spanish language. In this period, a lot of classical authors wrote: Garcilaso de la Vega, Fray Luis de León, Juan de Valdés and Cervantes (one of the most important writers in Spanish)

In 1713 the Real Academia Española, was created to preserve the purity of the language and give Spanish definitive and concrete rules to use it.

In the present, since the constitution of 1978, Spain has got multilingual character, because there are other languages spoken in different places of Spain apart of Spanish: Gallego, Catalán and Vasco. The two first from Latin, but the last one whose origin is unkown.


Best wishes,
Sabrina.