Spanish ( español, castellano)

Bienvenidos! - Welcome

Spanish belongs to the Romance branch of the Indo-European language family. Like all Romance languages, Spanish developed from Vulgar Latin in an area of the Iberian peninsula that is now Spain, and was brought to the Americas, the Philippines, and parts of Oceania by the Spanish colonization in the 16th century. It is spoken as a first language by about 352 million people, or by 417 million including second-language speakers, the majority of whom live in Latin America and Spain (Ethnologue). With close to 106 million first-language speakers, Mexico has the largest population of Spanish-speakers in the world. The four next largest populations reside in Colombia (44 million), Spain (43 million), Argentina (39 million) and U.S. (28 million).

Spaniards call their language español when contrasting it with other national languages. They refer to it as castellano (Castilian) when contrasting it with other regional languages of Spain, e.g., Catalan, Galician or Basque. Other Spanish-speaking countries tend to favor one or the other of the two terms.

Spanish is the official language of 22 countries: Argentina, Bolivia (with Quechua and Aymara), Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Equatorial Guinea (with French), Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay (with Guarani), Peru (with Quechua and Aymara), Puerto Rico (with English), Spain (co-official in some regions with Catalan, Galician and Basque), Uruguay, Venezuela, and Western Sahara (with Arabic).

Spanish is one of six official working languages of the United Nations and the European Union.

In the United States, Spanish is the most studied foreign language in schools and universities. Spanish has co-official status in the state of New Mexico, and in Puerto Rico.

Select from the languages below:
Egyptian Arabic	Modern Standard Arabic	Cantonese
Croatian	Czech	Danish
Dutch	English	Finnish
German	Greek	Hindi
Icelandic	Italian	Japanese
Korean	Mandarin	Polish
Portuguese	Russian	Spanish
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Ukrainian	Welsh