User:Jessica202/jessica202

Hi I am jessica202.if you come to this page on Mondays I will put up facts.

Here are 4 facts about the Spanish language you might be interested to know:

1. With 329 million native speakers, Spanish ranks as the world's No. 2 language in terms of how many people speak it as their first language. It is slightly ahead of English (328 million) but far behind Chinese (1.2 billion). (Source: Ethnologue)

2. Spanish has at least 3 million native speakers each in 44 countries, making it the fourth mostly geographically widely spoken language behind English (112 countries), French (60) and Arabic (57). (Source: Ethnologue)

3. Spanish is part of the Indo-European family of languages, which are spoken by more than a third of the world's population. Other Indo-European languages include English, French, German, the Scandinavian languages, the Slavic languages and many of the languages of India. Spanish can be classified further as a Romance language, a group that includes French, Portuguese, Italian, Catalan and Romanian.

4. Although there is no clear boundary defining when the Latin of what is now the north-central area of Spain became Spanish, it is safe to say that the language of the Castile region became a distinct language in part because of efforts by King Alfonso in the 13th century to standardize the language for official use. By the time Columbus came to the Western Hemisphere in 1492, Spanish had reached the point where the language as spoken and written would be easily understandable today.