Languages are fascinating creatures. Read on and discover some cool things you didn’t know about Spanish.

• There are 21 countries that have Spanish as their official language. English is an official language in 67 countries, French is second with 29 countries and Arabic is third, with 23.

• Spanish is further classified as a Romance language, along with Catalan, Italian, French, Portuguese and… Romanian!

• The Spanish language derives from a particular type of spoken Latin. This dialect developed in the central-northern region of the Iberian Peninsula following the 5th-century demise of the Western Roman Empire.
• There are more than a few discrepancies between the Spanish of Spain and that of Latin America. There are also countless differences in the Spanish language within Latin America itself!

• Spanish is a phonetic language.

• Apart from Latin, Arabic is the largest contributor to Spanish. Words like alfombra (carpet), aceituna (olive) and almohada (pillow) come from Arabic.

• Spanish is a gendered language: the gender of adjectives and articles must agree with their accompanying nouns.
• It’s estimated that almost 400 million people worldwide speak Spanish.

• Spanish is the third most used language on the internet.

• Spanish from Argentina and Uruguay use the second person vos instead of tú.

• We use inverted exclamation and question marks at the beggining: ¡! | ¿?

• You can refer to Spanish as “español” or “castellano”.

• Specially in Buenos Aires, Uruguay and some other provinces the sound of /y/ and /ll/ is different to that of other Hispanic countries.

• There are 17 tenses in Spanish (don’t panic, you don’t really need all of them!)

• It is the second most studied language in the world

• South America= Latin America? South America is a geographical entity: the subcontinent or continent south of Central America. It ranges from the Panama Isthmus to Cape Horn.

• Latin America is a cultural entity: countries in the Americas where a Latin language is spoken (Spanish, Portuguese, French).

Hope you found some cool facts about Spanish!

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Until next time,

Mati

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