Language Learning: Spanish
The National Football League’s 2026 draft was held earlier this year. The first pick in the draft was Fernando Mendoza from Indiana University who was selected by the Las Vegas Raiders. Mendoza is bilingual in English and Spanish, and gave part of his post-draft press conference in Spanish. He also spoke partly in Spanish during his speech after receiving the Heisman Trophy, which is awarded annually to the nation’s top college football player, earlier in the year.
This made us think of Spanish as a language. So far this year, CETRA has provided 10 different Spanish dialects to clients. It is one of the most widely-spoken languages on the globe.
According to Britannica, Spanish is the native language of nearly 500 million people. This makes Spanish the globe’s second most-spoken native language behind Mandarin Chinese.
Spanish is an official language in 20 countries, including Spain, many Latin, Caribbean and South American countries, and Equatorial Guinea in Africa. It is spoken at least in part in nearly all of South America with the exception of Brazil, which speaks mostly Portuguese. There are also many who speak Judeo-Spanish, which is commonly known as Ladino, and is derived from 15th-century Old Spanish. Ladino is an endangered language spoken mostly in Israel.
This has created many different regional varieties of Spanish with different areas having differences in pronunciation, vocabulary, and grammar. However, most Spanish speakers worldwide can understand each other.
Despite the global presence of Spanish, the language has a four percent share of global URLs, which is dominated by English.
Spanish started in the 9th century in Cantabria, Spain, and it originated from Latin. With its Latin roots, Spanish is considered to be one of the Romance languages joining French, Italian, Portuguese, and Romanian.In fact,Spanish was first known as Castilian, which is the dialect from which modern Spanish developed. In the 15th century, Spanish became the official language of Spain.
The language continues to evolve. The Real Academia Española (RAE) was founded in 1713 to help standardize Spanish globally, and it continues to work with other organizations worldwide to maintain and document Spanish. Today Spanish is one of the official languages of the United Nations and Olympics.
For more information on the services we can provide to support your Spanish language needs, please contact us at info@cetra.com.
Sources:
https://www.britannica.com/topic/Spanish-language
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/ranked-the-most-common-website-languages-on-the-internet
