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13 Cool and Interesting Facts About the Spanish Language

by | Jun 2, 2014

1. Spanish is spoken by 500 million people with a growing trend that will reach 600 million speakers by 2050. –Source: Instituto Cervantes
2. Spanish was the diplomatic language up to the 18th century. –Source: BBC
3. There have been 11 Literature Nobel Prizes in Spanish: José Echegaray (Spain, 1904); Jacinto Benavente (Spain, 1922); Gabriela Mistral (Chile, 1945); Juan Ramón Jiménez (Spain, 1956); Miguel Ángel Asturias (Guatemala, 1967); Pablo Neruda (Chile, 1971); Vicente Aleixandre (Spain, 1977); Gabriel García Márquez (Colombia, 1982); Camilo José Cela (Spain, 1989); Octavio Paz (Mexico, 1990) and Mario Vargas Llosa (Spain -born in Perú-, 2010). –Source: Instituto Cervantes and Wikipedia
4. Spanish is the second most studied language in the world. In 2010, the number of people studying Spanish as a second language was more than 20 million. In three generations, 10% of the world population will be able to communicate in Spanish. –Source: Instituto Cervantes
5. Words like murciélago, comunidades, ecuación and auténtico are some of the 355 words with all 5 vowels that Amparo Atehortua, a woman from Medellín, compiled after reading all the Larousse                         dictionary. –Source: RCN La Radio
6. After Latin, the language that has had the biggest influence on Spanish is Arabic. Today, the foreign language exerting the most influence is English. –Source: About.com
7. Mexico contains the largest population of Spanish speakers with 114 million followed by the United States with 50 million. –Source: Wikipedia
8. All countries from Central America, except El Salvador, use the term español to refer to Spanish more than the word castellano and all the countries from South America, except for Colombia, use the term castellano more than the word español. –Source: Wikipedia
9. In 2005, the National Congress of Brazil approved a bill, signed into law by the President, making Spanish language teaching mandatory in both public and private secondary schools in Brazil. –Source: Wikipedia
10. The United States has almost 40 million native Spanish speakers. By 2050 it will become the largest Spanish-speaking country in the world. There are more Spanish speakers in the United States than there are speakers of Chinese, French, Italian, Hawaiian, and the Native American languages combined. –Source: Instituto Cervantes and Spanish Language Domains
11. Las Glosas Emilianenses (Glosses of Saint Emilianus) was the first written Spanish record dating back to 964. It is the first known document, consisting of notes in both Spanish and Basque in the margins of a religious manuscript in Latin. The first literary work fully written in Spanish was El Cantar del Mio Cid , an anonymous poem from the 12th century. –Source: BBC
12. Spanish is the official language of 22 countries and the second largest native language in the world, the second language used for international communication and the third most used language on the Internet. –Source: Instituto Cervantes
13. The first Spanish grammar was created by Elio Antonio de Nebrija and published in 1492, the same year Columbus discovered America. –Source: BBC

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