| About the Spanish language |
|
|
Stran 1 od 3 Introduction Andragoški zavod Maribor - Ljudska univerza is the author and the coordinator of the Language Festival project. Together with the partners from the Netherlands, Germany, Check Republic, Slovakia and Hungary we applied for financing with EU programme Socrates - Lingua 1. The project received positive feedback and was accepted by European Commission to be implemented between October 2003 and October 2005. In the project we prepared and organised the Language Festival in Maribor from 29th September to 2nd October 2004, held book exhibition of minor European languages, produced a web site and books on chosen languages. The Festival hosted many experts who introduced 24 European languages to general public in 4 days not only at AZM-LU but also at many schools and other institutions. In April 2005 we held book exhibition where we presented books and other materials on 17 minor European languages at Maribor Faculty of Education. We finalised the activities by producing the web site you're using at the moments. Here you can find some information regarding language connected culture, basic characteristics of relevant languages and language survival kits. Website language is Slovenian. Also German and English versions are available. In time we hope to achieve English, German and Esperanto descriptions for all languages. This website is still very much alive and constantly expanding. We plan to add new languages as well. Promotionally the project enjoyed great success. In cooperation with Mediamix we created an innovative way of attracting the public and received many awards at advertising festivals. Socrates Lingua declared the Language Festival project one of 50 best examples of promoting languages. Info regarding promotion of the Festival is available on: http://www.mediamix.si/slo/News/2005junij02.html Melita Cimerman and Zlatko Tišljar. Author: M. Jorge CAMACHO CORDÓN Spanish is an Iberian Romance language of Indo-European origin. Español or castellano, as it is called in Spanish, is the third or fourth most widely spoken language in the world with 352 million native speakers. If one includes non-native speakers about 417 million people, with most of them in Latin America, speak Spanish. Spanish is 'the' or 'an' official language in Argentina, Colombia, Mexico, Spain, Venezuela and 16 other countries. In the USA, a sizeable minority speak Spanish. Total speakers: 417 Million History The Spanish language developed from the Latin spoken after the end of the Roman Empire. It has many influences from Basque and Arabic. Typical features of Spanish diachronical phonology include lenition (eg. the Latin word 'vita' changes to Spanish 'vida'), palatalization (Latin 'annum', Spanish 'año') and diphthongation of breve E/O from vulgar Latin (Latin 'terra', Spanish 'tierra'; Latin 'novus', Spanish 'nuevo'). Similar changes happened in most Romance languages as well. During the Reconquista, this northern dialect of Spanish was carried south. Spanish colonization since 16th century brought the language to the Americas, Federated States of Micronesia, Guam, Marianas, Palau and the Philippines. And in the 20th century, Spanish was introduced in Equatorial Guinea and Western Sahara. Spanish is nicknamed la lengua de Cervantes (the language of Cervantes, the author of the Quixote). Geographic distribution Spanish is one of the official languages of the United Nations, the European Union and the African Union. With close to 100 million first-language speakers, Mexico boasts the largest population of Spanish-speakers in the world. The four next largest populations reside in Colombia (44 million), Spain (c. 41 million), Argentina (39 million) and the United States of America (c. 30 million). Spanish is the official and most important language in 20 countries: Argentina, Bolivia (co-official Aymará), Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Equatorial Guinea (co-official French), Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay (co-official Guaraní), Peru (co-official Quechua and Aymará), Puerto Rico, Spain (co-official Catalan, Galician, Basque and Aranese), Uruguay and Venezuela . It is the most important and widely-spoken language, but without official recognition, in Andorra and Belize. It is spoken by most of the population of Gibraltar (which is claimed by Spain), but English remains the most spoken and only official language of the colony. In the United States — which has no officially recognized national language — Spanish is spoken by some three-quarters of its over 40 million Hispanic population. It is also learnt or spoken by a small, albeit growing, proportion of non-Hispanics for use in business, commerce and politics. At a federal level it shares a privileged position along with the more dominant English. At a state level, however, Spanish does hold co-official status in various states. Spanish is also spoken in Canada, Israel (both Spanish and Judaeo-Spanish), northern Morocco, Netherlands Antilles, Trinidad and Tobago, Turkey (as Judaeo-Spanish) and Western Sahara. In the Philippines, where its use has been in decline, Spanish ceased to be an official language in 1973. It is now spoken by less than 0.01% of the population or 2,658 speakers according to the 1990 Census. Interestingly, despite the native and English numerals being the only counting systems used in all matters and circumstances, the Spanish decimals are still utilised by many when counting money. Furthermore, the sole existing Spanish-Asiatic creole language, Chabacano, is spoken by some in the south. Most other native Filipino languages contain generous quantities of Spanish loan words. Variations of the Spanish language There are important variations in dialect among the various regions of Spain and Spanish-speaking America. In Spain the North Castilian dialect pronunciation is commonly taken as the national standard. Spanish has three second-person singular pronouns tú, usted and in Latin America vos. Tú is informal (for example, used with friends) and usted is formal (for example, used with older people). Vos is used in various regions of Latin America, and its use, depending on region, can be considered the accepted standard or reproached as sub-standard and considered as speech of the uneducated. The interpersonal situations in which the employment of vos is acceptable also differ between regions. The Real Academia Española, in association with twenty-one other national language academies, exercises a conservative influence through its publication of dictionaries and widely respected grammar guides and style guides. Grammar - Phonology The consonantal system of Castilian Spanish, by the 16th century, underwent some important changes that differentiated it from some neighbouring Romance languages, such as Portuguese, Valencian and Catalan). For example, the 'v' and 'b' sounds merged. This explains why Spanish speakers may find it difficult to pronounce words beginning with 'b' and 'v' in other languages as they do not correspond to different phonemes in contemporary Spanish. The consonantal system of Medieval Spanish has been better preserved in Judaeo-Spanish, the language spoken by the descendants of the Jews expelled from Spain in the 15th century. Lexical stress Spanish has a phonemic stress system — the place where stress will fall cannot be predicted by other features of the word, and two words can differ by just a change in stress. For example, the word camino (with stress on the second to last syllable) means "I walk" or "road" whereas caminó (with final stress) means "he/she/it walked". Also, since Spanish pronounces all syllables at a more or less constant tempo, it is said to be a syllable-timed language. Writing system Spanish is written using the Latin alphabet, with a few special letters: the vowels can be marked with an acute accent (á, é, í, ó, ú) to mark stress when it doesn't follow the normal pattern or to differentiate otherwise equally spelt words; diaeresis u (ü) after g to indicate a [gw] or [gu] pronunciation; and n with tilde (ñ) to indicate the palatal nasal [J]. Written Spanish precedes exclamatory and interrogative clauses with inverted question and exclamation marks, examples: ¿Qué dices? (What do you mean?) ¡No es verdad! (That's not true!). It is one of the few languages whose written form does so. In a number of cases, homonyms are distinguished with written accents on the stressed (or only) syllable: for example, te (object case of "you") and té ("tea"); se (third person reflexive) and sé ("I know" or imperative "Be"); como ("like" or "I eat") and cómo ("how?"). Spanish orthography is such that every speaker can guess the pronunciation (adapted for accent) from the written form. While the same pronunciation could be misspelt in several ways — there are homophones, because of the language's silent h, vacilations between b and v, and between c and z (and between c, z, and s in Latin America and some parts of the Peninsula) — the orthography is far more coherent than, say, English orthography. |
