The
Spanish language developed from
vulgar Latin, with loan-words from
Basque in the north and
Arabic in the southern part of the
Iberian Peninsula (see
Iberian Romance languages). Typical features of Spanish diachronic
phonology include
lenition (Latin
vita, Spanish
vida; Latin
lupus, Spanish
lobo),
palatalization (Latin
annum, Spanish
año) and diphthongation of short E/O from vulgar Latin (Latin
terra, Spanish
tierra; Latin
novus, Spanish
nuevo; Latin
tempus, Spanish
tiempo; Latin
ferrum, Old Spanish
fierro and modern
hierro). Similar phenomena can be found in many other
Romance languages as well, especially after the fall of the
Roman Empire in the 4th century AD reduced cultural contact with the Roman Empire.
The standard Spanish language is also called Castilian. In its earliest documented form, and up through approximately the fifteenth century, the language is customarily called Old Spanish. From approximately the sixteenth century on, it is called Modern Spanish. Spanish of the 16th and 17th centuries is sometimes called "classical" Spanish, referring to the literary accomplishments of that period. Unlike English and French, it is not customary to speak of a "middle" stage in the development of Spanish. Castilian Spanish originated, after the decline of the Roman Empire, as a continuation of spoken Latin in the Cordillera Cantábrica, in northern Spain, in the 8th and 9th centuries AD, according to most authorities; but others claim it came from Franco-Navarrese and Gothic-Castilian dialects in the 11th century AD. With the Reconquista, this northern dialect spread to the south, where it almost entirely replaced or absorbed the provincial dialects, at the same time as it borrowed massively from the vocabulary of Moorish Arabic and was influenced by Mozarabes (the Romance speech of Christians living in Moorish territory) and medieval Judeo-Spanish (Ladino). These languages all but vanished in the Iberian peninsula by the late 16th century.
The prestige of Old Castile and its language was propagated partly by the exploits of Castilian heroes in the battles of the Reconquista — among them Fernán González and Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar (El Cid) — and by the narrative poems about them that were recited in Castilian even outside the original territory of that dialect.
The "first written Spanish" is traditionally considered to have appeared in the Glosas Emilianenses. These are "glosses" (translations of isolated words and phrases in a form more like Spanish than Latin) added between the lines of a manuscript that was written earlier in Latin. Their date, derived by various means, is often estimated as A.D. 978.
