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Spanish


Overview

Departments & Related Programs

The Department of Spanish and Portuguese The Latin American, Latinx, and Caribbean Studies 

Spanish belongs to the Romance group of the Italic subfamily of the Indo-European family of languages. Spanish is spoken as a first language by about 330 million persons and as a second language by perhaps another 50 million. Spanish is a descendant of the vernacular Latin brought to the Iberian peninsula by the soldiers and colonists of ancient Rome. Thus the Spanish vocabulary is basically of Latin origin, although it has been influenced by Arabic, French, and Italian. The oldest extant written records of Spanish date from the middle of the 10th century A.D.