Spanish: A History

For today’s blog, I wanted to take a step back from language as it exists today to look at the history of specific languages. The article I chose discussed the origins of Spanish and the deviations that exist in the language. Learning about its history reveals the extent to which language is affected by the political operations taking place (conquests, etc).

Spanish originated in the Iberian Peninsula; the inhabitants learned Latin from Roman traders, settlers, administrators, and soldiers under Roman rule in 19 BCE and mixed it with their native languages (namely, Iberian, Celtic, and Carthaginian). The result is a language referred to as Vulgar Latin, which borrowed the basic models from Latin, but borrowed and added words from other languages. This remained the official language until about 719 CE, when the Moors, Arabic-speaking Islamic groups, conquered the region. As a result, Vulgar Latin expanded and changed as it borrowed many words from the Arabic dialects.

When the Christian kingdoms reconquered Moorish Spain, they carried Castilian (a dialect from the Northern Central plains that was a hybrid between Vulgar Latin and Arabic) South as they moved across Spain. In the 13th century, King Alfonso X worked to make Castilian the official language of Spain, and made his scholars write original works in Castilian and translate existing scientific, legal, and literary works into Castilian. Castilian became the written and educational standard in Spain under the rule of Isabella and Ferdinand; however, several other spoken dialects remained. The most prominent of these was Andalusian, spoken in the southern region of Spain.

The Spanish language crossed the ocean along with the Spanish explorers, conquistadors, and colonizers beginning in the 1400’s. Both the Castilian and Andalusian dialects were brought along; Castilian was used in administrative and cultural centers such as Mexico City and Lima in Peru, while the Andalusian dialect became dominant in Argentina and Central America, which were regions remote from the influence of the Spanish government's administrative centers.

The Spanish spoken in the Americas today differs from European Spanish because it borrowed many words from the languages of the indigenous peoples. These differences are reflected both in the actual words and grammar of the language. One interesting difference is the use of “vos” (meaning “you”) instead of “tu” in South American countries like Uruguay, Ecuador, and Argentina. While “vos” was once used in Castilian Spanish, it is no longer a part of the language. One explanation for this is:

“In Spain, although vos denoted high social status by those who were addressed as such (monarchs, nobility, etc.), these people never actually used the pronoun themselves since there were not any people above them in society. Those who used vos were the inferiors (lower classes and peasants). When the waves of Spanish immigrants arrived to populate the New World, they were primarily comprised of these lower classes and peasants. They would then want to raise their social status from what it was in Spain and would demand to be addressed as vos. Everyone thus became vos in the Americas, and the pronoun was transformed into an indicator of low status not only for the addresser, but also for the addressee. Conversely, in Spain today vos is still considered a highly exalted archaism that is confined to liturgy, and its use by native Spaniards is seen as deliberate archaism.”

Although this explanation sounds plausible, it does not explain why vos is barely used in Mexico or in other South American countries like Paraguay, Bolivia, and Chile.

And it’s not just the words and grammar that are different across the Spanish-speaking countries; the accent changes noticeably from place to place. Hispanic linguist Bertil Malmberg gave one explanation for the different accents in Mexico and Spain. He explained that there is a tendency in Spanish to prefer syllables that end in vowels, which leads to a weakening of final consonants. However, in Mexican Spanish, it is vowels that lose strength, while consonants are fully pronounced, which he claims is caused by the influence of English from the geographically close United States. Mexican Spanish further tends to imitate English in its tendency towards stress timing (in a stress-timed language—like English—syllables may last different amounts of time, but there is a constant amount of time on average between two consecutive stressed syllables).

It’s an interesting idea: that a language can be influenced simply by the close and ubiquitous presence of a language with different standards of pronunciation. It makes me think about my own experience as a Spanish speaker living in the US; when I speak to other Spanish speakers, they comment that my Spanish is distinct—it’s not exactly Mexican nor South American nor Castilian. I know that part of the reason for this is because although I speak Spanish at home, I don’t hear it in public or in the media, so my knowledge of regional slang is severely limited: in terms of slang and colloquialisms, I know only what I hear from my parents. But maybe another part of it is that my Spanish is influenced by the patterns of speech I hear in English?

http://media.www.signal-online.net/media/storage/paper771/news/2007/11/28/News/Spanish.Not.Your.Standard.Language-3117377.shtml

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_dialects_and_varieties

http://www.alsintl.com/languages/Spanish.shtml