Intercultural Communication – Spanish Language

Spanish is conceived historically to be developed from the local languages. A debate of the way in which its morph syntax, its vocabulary, its phonology and the meaning of its words has evolved. This has been referred to as the historical grammar of the Spanish language. Spanish is an Indo-European languages group member, and it is said that it began to be spoken as from approximately 5000 years age in an area around the Black sea (Ducey 1998) what is now known as Turkey. Latin is an ancestor of the Spanish language, since there is a chain of speakers that is unbroken. Each one of them learning their parents’ language, stretching from the people of Western Roman Empire 2000 years ago to the current Spanish-speaking population of today (Rosenthal, 1893). It can be, therefore, alternatively expressed that the relationship between Spanish and Latin is that Spanish is a part of Latin, since Latin still remains spoken in parts of Africa, Europe and America. Similar claims have been raised in the case of Catalan, Italian, Portuguese, French and Romanian. The major reason as to why the term Latin is not used for these various forms of writing and speech is that of convenience. Another powerful reason that triggers the distinctive use of labels such as Spanish, French etc., is that the development of states during the medieval periods necessitated the use of different linguistic identity (Ducey 1998). The bottom line here is that Spanish language borrows widely from the above-mentioned languages.

The main difference between Spanish and English is that Spanish has 5 pure diphthongs and 5 pure vowels, while English has 8 diphthongs and 12 pure vowel sounds. Due to this fact, Spanish learners may have a problem in distinguishing the sounds of words such as; taught/tot cart/cat/cut, ship/sheep and fool/full.