1 Jun /16

Spanish Languages – Trivia, Learning and Translations

Spanish Languages
Spanish Languages – Trivia, Learning and Translations – EVS Translations

Did you know that the Foreign Service Institute has developed an actual list ranking the difficulty of the most common languages in the world?! Well, they do say information (understand statistics) is the highlight of the millennium! According to this classification (manufactured from the standpoint of a native English speaking person), Spanish happens to be in the first group of languages, that are closely related to English and thus relatively easy to learn.

This study kind of gives an unrealistic idea of how many hours you will need to invest in learning Spanish and soon you will realise that oversimplifying stuff is not a good idea if you want to properly speak or interpret spoken Spanish. A language is a living thing and Spain proves to be a thriving environment for co-existing languages. Apart from the Castillian (castellano), which is the only to have official status in the whole country, there are several regional co-official languages, that dominate in their respective part of the country. That makes knowing the quirks of the region essential for a successful translation. In the recent years, there is a flourishing trend in education and publishing, especially in Basque and Catalan.

Català or Valenciano is a co-official language spoken by approximately 17% of the population in Spain. It was named after its origins in Catalonia and is spoken also on the Balearic Islands, in Valencia, parts of Aragon, Murcia and in the historic French region Roussillon. Catala is the official language of Andorra, as well. It is interesting to know that Catalan differs more from the Ibero-Romance languages than from the Gallo-Romance, in terms of vocabulary and grammar. Also the Catalan is unparalleled in Europe being such a large, bilingual, non-state community and after Spain’s transition to democracy it has gained more prestige in education and mass media.

The second co-official regional language in Spain, according to its popularity, is the Galician or Galego. It is spoken mainly in Galicia, which is an autonomous community and some parts of Asturias and Castilla y Leon. That makes roughly some 7% of the Spanish population. It is an Ibero-Romance language close to the Portuguese, in fact they are classified as sibling languages.

Third in popularity on the list of the Spanish co-official languages comes the ever so curious Basque language or Euskara. It is spoken in the Basque country, which includes parts of both Spain (northwestern) and France (southwestern). It is a language isolate, which basically means it has nothing in common with any other language and no genealogical relationships with an ancestral group can be traced. It does use the Latin script though.

Knowing all that, you will now definitely reconsider the easiness of learning Spanish and consider the difficulties and challenges all Spanish translators and Spanish language interpreters face on a daily basis.