Spanish

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Spanish is a Romance language, native to Spain but spoken throughout Central and South America, and the United States. The dialect known as Castilian is from Spain only and has grammatical and phonological differences from southern Spain and all other dialects of Spanish.

Spanish Español
Spoken in:	Spain (among many others) (España)
Conworld:	Real world
Total speakers:	400 million native.
Genealogical classification:	Indo-European Italic Romance      Latin      Ibero-Romance      Spanish
Basic word order:	SVO,
Morphological type:	Inflecting
Morphosyntactic alignment:	nominative-accusative
Writing system:
Created by:
unknown	15th century C.E.

Phonology

Spanish has six plosive phonemes:

	bilabial	dental	velar
voiceless	/p/	/t/	/k/
voiced	/b/	/d/	/g/

The voiced plosives generally are articulated as plosives under certain conditions, such as initially, or after certain other phonemes. Under other circumstances they are fricatives [β ð ɣ] or even approximants.

There are either three or four voiceless fricatives, depending on dialect:

/f θ s x/

In most dialects, /θ/ is merged into /s/. Actually, /θ/ is only conserved in some areas in Spain. /x/ is often pronounced as [h], though it still acts phonemically velar by turning a preceding /n/ into [ŋ]. In some dialects final /s/ weakens to [h].

SAMPA lists two affricates:

/ʧ ɟʝ/

/ʧ/ is usually pronounced as palatal [cç]. /ɟʝ/ can be pronounced as lightly as [j] and as strongly as [ɟʝ].

There are three phonemic nasals:

/m n ɲ/

[ŋ] is an allophone of /n/ before velars, and word-finally in some dialects. tengo would be [t̪e̞ŋgo̞]

The liquids are:

/l ʎ ɾ r/

In some dialects, mainly American ones, /ʎ/ has merged into /jj/.

The semivowels are /j w/, and the vowels are the basic five-vowel set /a e i o u/.

The /a/, /e/ and /o/ vowels aren't described in IPA within the standard vowels. Diacritcs must be used as the following to represent them correctly: [ä], [e̞], [o̞].

Orthography

Spanish orthography is regular in the sense that the pronunciation of a word can always be correctly divined from the spelling. However, silent letters and the falling together of some original phonemes mean that it is sometimes not possible to know the spelling of a word knowing only the pronunciation.

The accute accent is used to note stress in words of two or more syllables following certain rules. Additionaly, monosyllabic minimal pairs, one of the words have an accent to differentiate from the other one.

In measured poetry, an umlaut or diaeresis is used to mark a hiatus in words that otherwise would normally create a diphthong: la risa süave. The umlaut is also used in combinations of or <g> before a spoken <u>,as most words with <qu> have the <u> unpronounced.

Languages based on Spanish

Creoles and natural descendants

Ladino. Spoken by descendants of Sephardi Jews expelled from Spain in the 15th century. It's spoken in certain areas around the world, mainly in Israel.

Portuñol. A mix of Spanish and Portuguese spoken in some southern Brazil areas.

Constructed languages

Montreiano

External links

SAMPA for Spanish

[1] Comment about Spanish vowels.