Are you thinking about to create a Spanish version of your website? here a post that will help you to do so. Spanish is one of the most important languages in the world and also one of the most spoken ones. It is one of the 6 official languages of the United Nations. Spanish is a language from the romance languages family, alongside French, Italian, Portuguese, Occitan, Catalan, Romanian and others. The root of all these languages is the Indo-European languages family, an even more primitive group that was formed thanks to the immigration of people from the Indian Peninsula to Europe, and viceversa, between an estimated time of 3000 years, from 4000 BC to 1000 BC. The origin of Spanish itself takes us back to the 13th century, where the first written standard of this language was first developed, in Toledo, Spain. After that, Spanish has been spreading all over the world and its inhabitants, specially with the military interventions and invasions that Spain conducted to America, Africa and Asia, from the 15th to the 18th centuries, and after that the massive immigration of people from Spanish-speaking countries to another, such as United States and Europe countries.
According to Ethnologue[1], Spanish is currently positioned 2° in the ranking of languages by total number of speakers, with around 470 million speakers worldwide. These speakers are distributed in Europe, South America and Central America specially, where Spanish is the official language for almost every country in this areas (Except Europe). The most populated countries who are examples of the regions mentioned above are Mexico (117 million speakers), United States (around 52 million speakers), Colombia (47 million speakers), Spain (46 million speakers), Argentina (42 million speakers), Venezuela (29 million speakers), and many others, like Peru, Chile, Paraguay, Guatemala, Portugal, Cuba, Nicaragua, Puerto Rico and Italy. Also, Spanish is spoken in other continents and regions, like Asia and Africa. For example, Equatorial Guinea (almost 1 million speakers), Morocco (3 million speakers), and Western Sahara (22,000 speakers) are cases in Africa. In Asia, Spanish is spoken in the Philippines (more than 3 million speakers), Israel (175,000 speakers) and Turkey (13,000 speakers). There are also 447,000 persons who speak Spanish in Australia, and 47,000 in New Zealand, both countries located in Oceania.
There are different dialects and forms to speak Spanish; the Latin American Spanish, Spain Spanish, Mexican Spanish, African Spanish and other examples, each one with different words and unique uses and phrase structure (in some cases).
[1] A web-based publication that contains statistics for 7,106 languages and dialects.
