Influences On The Spanish Language

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Influences on the Spanish language

Spanish has also absorbed many loanwords from other Romance languages, notably from French, and in recent times also from English.

Much as English in the United States and Canada, it is now spoken by a host of people in the Americas, multicultural backgrounds including those of Amerindian and African heritage. The extensive contact between Spanish and the native American languages, has also deeply influenced not just local dialects of Spanish, but also the Spanish language as a whole.

Formative influences

As Spanish went through its first stages of development in Spain, it probably received influences from neighbouring related languages, among them Basque, which is a language isolate and thus completely unrelated to Spanish in origin. Umbrian and Oscan influences have also been postulated for the Roman colonization period.

Celtiberian influence

Two specific types of lenition, the voicing of voiceless consonants and the elision of voiced consonants, are the phonological changes of Spanish that are most often attributed to the influence of Celtic languages; ...
... they have also been attributed to the influence of the Basque language. While examples of these two types of lenition are ubiquitous and well-documented in Spanish, two assumptions need to be made if these two types of lenition are to be attributed to patterns of lenition in Celtic languages. The first assumption is that a population of bilingual Celtiberian–Vulgar Latin speakers existed long enough to have had an influence on the development of Old Spanish. The second assumption is that Continental Celtic, an extinct branch of Celtic, did indeed exhibit the types of lenition that are known to exist in modern Insular Celtic languages. The latter is simply not known, and it should also be noted that such lenitions are a very common kind of change in languages all around the world, and similar phenomena are found in Corsican and Sardinian where no Celtic causation is plausible. The Spanish development may therefore just be a natural internal process, not due to outside influence.

Basque influence

Many Castilians who took part in the Reconquista and later repopulation campaigns of Muslim Iberia were of Basque lineage and this is evidenced by many place names throughout Spain. The change from Latin 'f-' to Spanish 'h-' was once commonly ascribed to the influence of Basque speakers for a few reasons.

Gothic

Spain was controlled by the Visigoths between the 5th and 8th centuries. However, the influence of the Gothic language (an East Germanic language) on Spanish was minimal because the invaders were already somewhat Romanized, were secluded in the upper echelons of society, and generally did not intermarry with the natives.

Although Germanic languages by most accounts affected the phonological development very little, Spanish words of Germanic origin are present in all varieties of Modern Spanish. Many of the Spanish words of Germanic origin were already present in Vulgar Latin, and so they are shared with other Romance languages.

Arabic

In 711 AD, most of the Iberian Peninsula was conquered by Arabic-speaking Muslims, who had recently also conquered a large part of northwest Africa. They occupied a territory that included north central Spain, where the Spanish language (i.e. Castilian) is usually assumed to have been born. Loanwords from Arabic thus entered Castilian during its earliest formative period, particularly as the number of Arabic speakers in the neighboring lower reaches of the Ebro valley gradually increased in the 8th and 9th centuries. This lexical influence reached its greatest level during the Christian Reconquista, when the emerging Kingdom of Castile conquered large territories from Moorish rulers in the 11th, 12th and 13th centuries. These territories had large numbers of speakers of Arabic, as well as many who spoke local Romance dialects (Mozarabic language) that were heavily influenced by Arabic, both influencing Castilian. Arabic words and their derivatives had also been brought into Castilian earlier by Mozarab Christians who emigrated northwards from Al-Andalus in times of sectarian violence, particularly during the times of Almohad and Almoravid rule in the 12th and 13th centuries.

Most Spanish nouns beginning with the letters al- have their origin in Arabic.

As to how many words in Modern Spanish are of Arabic origin, the estimates vary widely, depending largely on whether the count includes derived forms and place names. One respected authority suggests that they number more than 4,000, based on estimates of 850 of known etymology, 780 forms derived from them, 1,000 place names, 500 additional place names of "probable" Arabic origin, and "very numerous" Arabic-looking words whose affiliation has not yet been established.

Influences from Native American languages

In October 1492 Christopher Columbus made his first landfall in the Americas, and thereafter Spanish settlers began to come into contact with a host of native American languages. Most of these were wiped out or severely reduced in number of speakers and distribution area during the conquest.