HISTORY OF THE SPANISH LANGUAGE

The Spanish Language derived from a dialect of spoken Latin that developed in the north-central part of the Iberian Peninsula.
The Spanish Language (el idioma español) some times called Castilian (Castellano) is a romance language that gradually spread in the Kingdom of Castile and evolved into the principal language of government and trade. It was taken most notably to the Americas, and also to Africa and Asia Pacific with the expansion of the Spanish Empire between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries.
The Latin system of four verb conjugations is reduced to three in Spanish. The Latin infinitives endings in ARE, ERE and IRE, become Spanish infinitives in AR, ER and IR respectively.

The Spanish syntax provides overt marking for some direct objects: the so called “personal a” is a good example. The Spanish is the only romance language that maintains the use of a “redundant” indirect object pronoun (le, les) even in the presence of an indirect object noun phrase. In regard to subject pronoun, Spanish Language is considered a “pro drop language”, meaning that the verb phrase can often stand alone, without the use of a subject pronoun, or a subject noun phrase.

Due to its unique history of contact with other languages, the Spanish lexicon contains loanwords from Basque, Arabic, and indigenous languages of the Latin American Countries.

In contemporary Spain, Castilian is just one of the several regional languages spoken including Aranese, Basque, Catalan, Valencian and Galician.

The Real Academia de la Lengua Española, the Royal Spanish Academy, the RAE, founded in 1715, is the official royal institution responsible for regulating the Spanish language. It is based in Madrid, Spain, but is affiliated with national language academies in twenty one Spanish speaking nations.
The Royal Spanish Academy is a major publisher of dictionaries and grammars, and has a formal procedure for admitting words to its publications. Its website includes an online dictionary and other resources, all in Spanish. Its most famous publication is the Dictionary of the Spanish Language of the Royal Spanish Academy, el Diccionario de la Lengua Española de la Real Academia Española.