This article describes some of the longest words in the Spanish language.
Esternocleidooccipitomastoideos (31 letters) is the plural of the noun esternocleidooccipitomastoideo , which is the sternocleidomastoid, a muscle in the human neck. [1] The word has a 22-letter synonym: esternocleidomastoideo , [2] [3] [4] which is shorter because it omits the Latin prefix occipito- ('occipital'). [5] Both words are abbreviated as ECOM. [4]
The 24-letter word electroencefalografistas, plural of electroencefalografista , means 'electroencephalographists' or 'electroencephalographers': specialists in the brain measurement technology of electroencephalography (EEG). [3] [6]
The 23-letter adverb anticonstitucionalmente means 'anticonstitutionally'. [7] Anticonstitucionalmente is also the Portuguese translation; the French translation, anticonstitutionnellement , is an exceptionally long word as well (25 letters). [7]
In the table below, all of the Spanish nouns except for arteriosclerosis can be pluralised by adding an s (es for internacionalizaciones) to the end. The adjective otorrinolaringológico can also be pluralised with an s; the plurals of the other adjectives end in es.
The RAE column indicates whether the Real Academia Española lists and defines the word in the Diccionario de la lengua española , its official dictionary.
Spanish is a Romance language of the Indo-European language family that evolved from colloquial Latin spoken in the Iberian Peninsula of Europe. Today, it is a global language with more than 500 million native speakers, mainly in the Americas and Spain. Spanish is the official language of 20 countries. It is the world's second-most spoken native language after Mandarin Chinese; the world's fourth-most spoken language overall after English, Mandarin Chinese, and Hindustani (Hindi-Urdu); and the world's most widely spoken Romance language. The largest population of native speakers is in Mexico.
English nouns are inflected for grammatical number, meaning that, if they are of the countable type, they generally have different forms for singular and plural. This article discusses the variety of ways in which English plural nouns are formed from the corresponding singular forms, as well as various issues concerning the usage of singulars and plurals in English. For plurals of pronouns, see English personal pronouns.
Spanish is a grammatically inflected language, which means that many words are modified ("marked") in small ways, usually at the end, according to their changing functions. Verbs are marked for tense, aspect, mood, person, and number. Nouns follow a two-gender system and are marked for number. Personal pronouns are inflected for person, number, gender, and a very reduced case system; the Spanish pronominal system represents a simplification of the ancestral Latin system.
Leísmo is a dialectal variation in the Spanish language that occurs largely in Spain. It involves using the indirect object pronouns le and les in place of the direct object pronouns lo, la, los, and las, especially when the direct object refers to a male person or people.
The longest word in any given language depends on the word formation rules of each specific language, and on the types of words allowed for consideration.
Spanish pronouns in some ways work quite differently from their English counterparts. Subject pronouns are often omitted, and object pronouns come in clitic and non-clitic forms. When used as clitics, object pronouns can appear as proclitics that come before the verb or as enclitics attached to the end of the verb in different linguistic environments. There is also regional variation in the use of pronouns, particularly the use of the informal second-person singular vos and the informal second-person plural vosotros.
The Spanish language has nouns that express concrete objects, groups and classes of objects, qualities, feelings and other abstractions. All nouns have a conventional grammatical gender. Countable nouns inflect for number. However, the division between uncountable and countable nouns is more ambiguous than in English.
Spanish adjectives are similar to those in most other Indo-European languages. They are generally postpositive, and they agree in both gender and number with the noun they modify.
Spanish orthography is the orthography used in the Spanish language. The alphabet uses the Latin script. The spelling is fairly phonemic, especially in comparison to more opaque orthographies like English, having a relatively consistent mapping of graphemes to phonemes; in other words, the pronunciation of a given Spanish-language word can largely be predicted from its spelling and to a slightly lesser extent vice versa. Spanish punctuation includes the use of inverted question and exclamation marks: ⟨¿⟩ ⟨¡⟩.
Asturian is a West Iberian Romance language spoken in the Principality of Asturias, Spain. Asturian is part of a wider linguistic group, the Astur-Leonese languages. The number of speakers is estimated at 100,000 (native) and 450,000. The dialects of the Astur-Leonese language family are traditionally classified in three groups: Western, Central, and Eastern. For historical and demographic reasons, the standard is based on Central Asturian. Asturian has a distinct grammar, dictionary, and orthography. It is regulated by the Academy of the Asturian Language. Although it is not an official language of Spain it is protected under the Statute of Autonomy of Asturias and is an elective language in schools. For much of its history, the language has been ignored or "subjected to repeated challenges to its status as a language variety" due to its lack of official status.
Dominican Spanish is Spanish as spoken in the Dominican Republic; and also among the Dominican diaspora, most of whom live in the United States, chiefly in New York City, New Jersey, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and Florida. The Dominican accent is the most common Spanish accent in many parts of the US Northeast.
Portuguese and Spanish, although closely related Romance languages, differ in many aspects of their phonology, grammar and lexicon. Both belong to a subset of the Romance languages known as West Iberian Romance, which also includes several other languages or dialects with fewer speakers, all of which are mutually intelligible to some degree. A 1949 study by Italian-American linguist Mario Pei, analyzing the degree of difference from a language's parent by comparing phonology, inflection, syntax, vocabulary, and intonation, indicated the following percentages : In the case of Spanish it was 20%, the third closest Romance language to Latin, only behind Sardinian and Italian. Portuguese was 31%, making it the second furthest language from Latin after French.
The Diccionario de la lengua española, previously known as Diccionario de la Real Academia Española, is produced, edited, and published by the Royal Spanish Academy (RAE) with participation of the Association of Academies of the Spanish Language. It was first published in 1780, and subsequent editions have been published about once a decade. The twenty-third edition was published in 2014; it is available online, incorporating modifications to be included in the twenty-fourth print edition.
The FundéuRAE is a non-profit organization founded in February 2005 in Madrid, Spain. The foundation was created in collaboration with the Royal Spanish Academy and under the Department of Urgent Spanish of Agencia EFE. It took a new name, Fundéu BBVA, in 2008, and, after a short while with the original name, adopted in 2020 FundéuRAE.
Feminist language reform has proposed gender neutrality in languages with grammatical gender, such as Spanish. Grammatical gender in Spanish refers to how Spanish nouns are categorized as either masculine or feminine. As in other Romance languages—such as Portuguese, to which Spanish is very similar—a group of both men and women, or someone of unknown gender, is usually referred to by the masculine form of a nouns and or pronoun. Advocates of gender-neutral language modification consider this to be sexist, and exclusive of gender non-conforming people. They also stress the underlying sexism of words whose feminine form has a different, often less prestigious meaning. Some argue that a gender neutral Spanish can reduce gender stereotyping, deconstructing sexist gender roles and discrimination in the workplace.
Grammatical gender in Spanish affects several types of words which have inflection in the Spanish language according to grammatical gender: nouns, adjectives, determiners, and pronouns. All Spanish nouns have lexical gender, either masculine or feminine, and most nouns referring to male humans or animals are grammatically masculine, while most referring to females are feminine. In terms of markedness, the masculine is unmarked and the feminine is marked in Spanish.
Below are two estimates of the most common words in Modern Spanish. Each estimate comes from an analysis of a different text corpus. A text corpus is a large collection of samples of written and/or spoken language, that has been carefully prepared for linguistic analysis. To determine which words are the most common, researchers create a database of all the words found in the corpus, and categorise them based on the context in which they are used.
Spanish personal pronouns have distinct forms according to whether they stand for the subject (nominative) or object, and third-person pronouns make an additional distinction for direct object (accusative) or indirect object (dative), and for reflexivity as well. Several pronouns also have special forms used after prepositions.
Elle is a fringe neopronoun in Spanish intended as an alternative to the third-person gender-specific pronouns él ("he") and ella ("she"). It is supposed to be used when the gender of a person is not known or when it is not desirable to specify the person as either "he" or "she". It is not endorsed by any Spanish-language academy or institution. It is an equivalent of the singular they pronoun when used for gendering purposes.
uwu, also stylized as UwU, is an emoticon indicating cuteness. The "u" characters represent eyes, while the "w" represents a mouth. It is used to express various warm, happy, or affectionate feelings. A closely related emoticon is owo, which can more specifically show surprise and excitement. There are many variations of uwu and owo, including and OwO, UwU, and OwU, among others.
