For the third week of Bloomsbury Linguistics' Five Fun Facts about Languages, we've moved things up a gear and broadened our horizons to look at one of the biggest languages in the world. Here are our Five Fun Facts about Spanish! Let us know what you think @BloomsburyLing #5funfacts.
1) Around 406 million people speak Spanish as a native language across the globe. Mexico contains the largest population of Spanish speakers, at almost 117 million and the United States is second with 52 million. Spain itself has only the fourth largest population of Spanish speakers in the world, at around 46 and a half million. It is predicated that the USA will have taken the top spot by 2050.
2) After Mandarin and English, Spanish is the third most spoken language in the world by total number of speakers, and the official language of 22 countries. This is reflected in the 2007 statistics for internet usage, which shows Spanish as the third most commonly used language on the internet.
3) A manuscript dating to around 964 AD from the monastery of San Millán de la Cogolla contains, between the lines and in the margins of the Latin text, glosses written in Romance. These las Glosas Emilianenses (Glosses of Saint Emilianus) are believed to be the first written examples of both Spanish and Basque. 4) It is commonly believed that Castilian Spanish is spoken with a lisp due to ‘prestige borrowing’ of this pronunciation from a 14th century Spanish king who spoke with one. This is just an urban legend. While it is true that the sound /θ/ is prevalent in Castilian Spanish, there is a systematic distinction from the sound /s/, which could not have occurred if the lisp story was true. Also, the /θ/ sound only began to develop in the 16th century, two centuries after the lifetime of the king with the lisp, Pedro (the Cruel) of Castile.
5) There are 355 words in the Spanish language, including murciélago, comunidades, ecuación and auténtico, which use all 5 vowels. A woman from Medellín, Amparo Atehortua, complied the list of these words after reading the positively scintillating Larousse dictionary cover to cover.
Make sure to come back next Thursday when we'll be attempting to present five fun facts about the earilest attested Indo-European language - ancient Hittite!
Andrew Wardell
Editorial Assistant | Linguistics
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