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Speakers. According to the number of native speakers (300 million), Spanish ranks after Chinese and Hindi as the third language in the world. The largest Spanish-speaking countries are Mexico (101 million), Colombia (41 million), Spain (40 million), Argentina (36 million) and, probably, the United States (30 million?).
Importance. Although Spanish reached its maturity as a cultural language as early as during the 16th-17th c., the long-time backwardness of Spain prevented it from gaining the same acceptance for scholarly exchange at an international level as English, French, or German. Notwithstanding, this is one of six official languages of the United Nations.
History. Spanish evolved from Vulgar Latin, and is hence a Romance language. There are two written standards to Spanish: (1) European Spanish, primarily based on "Castellano" (Castilian, the dialect spoken in the region of Spain this language comes from), and (2) the Latin American variety called "español neutro", which was standardized in the late 20th c. by US and Mexican media groups, and later adopted by broadcasting companies from all over Latin America. The differences between European and American Spanish are by and large limited to vocabulary at a colloquial level.
Features. Spanish has the traits common to all Romance languages. In particular, it lost noun declension but kept a rich verb system, featuring a variety of tenses. An estimated 10% of its vocabulary was borrowed from Arabic, being a relic of a long period of Islamic rule over the Iberian peninsula (8th-15th c.).
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