The Royal Spanish Academy is Spain's official royal institution with a mission to ensure the stability of the Spanish language. It is based in Madrid, Spain, and is affiliated with national language academies in 22 other Hispanophone nations through the Association of Academies of the Spanish Language.
The Spanish language has two names: español and castellano. Spanish speakers from different countries or backgrounds can show a preference for one term or the other, or use them indiscriminately, but political issues or common usage might lead speakers to prefer one term over the other. This article identifies the differences between those terms, the countries or backgrounds that show a preference for one or the other, and the implications the choice of words might have for a native Spanish speaker.
In Spanish grammar, voseo is the use of vos as a second-person singular pronoun, along with its associated verbal forms, in certain regions where the language is spoken. In those regions it replaces tuteo, i.e. the use of the pronoun tú and its verbal forms. Voseo can also be found in the context of using verb conjugations for vos with tú as the subject pronoun.
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.
Loísmo, with its feminine counterpart laísmo, is a feature of certain dialects of Spanish consisting of the use of the pronouns lo, la, los, and las in place of the pronouns le and les. Loísmo and laísmo are almost entirely restricted to some dialects in central Spain; they are virtually absent from formal and written language. In practice laísmo is much more frequent than loísmo.
Prepositions in the Spanish language, like those in other languages, are a set of connecting words that serve to indicate a relationship between a content word and a following noun phrase, which is known as the object of the preposition. The relationship is typically spatial or temporal, but prepositions express other relationships as well. As implied by the name, Spanish "prepositions" are positioned before their objects. Spanish does not place these function words after their objects, which would be postpositions.
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.
Río Bravo is a town, with a population of 15,391, and a municipality in the Suchitepéquez department of Guatemala. Rio Bravo is a municipality that belongs to the department of Suchitepequez, in the Republic of Guatemala. The town was established December 10, 1951.
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 uniquely includes the use of inverted question and exclamation marks: ⟨¿⟩⟨¡⟩.
Standard Spanish, also called the norma culta, 'cultivated norm', refers to the standard, or codified, variety of the Spanish language, which most writing and formal speech in Spanish tends to reflect. This standard, like other standard languages, tends to reflect the norms of upper-class, educated speech. There is variation within this standard such that one may speak of the Mexican, Latin American, Peninsular, and Rioplatense standards, in addition to the standard forms developed by international organizations and multinational companies.
Central American Spanish is the general name of the Spanish language dialects spoken in Central America. More precisely, the term refers to the Spanish language as spoken in Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua. Panamanian Spanish is considered a variety of Caribbean Spanish, it is transitional between Central American and Caribbean dialects.
Chilean Spanish is any of several varieties of the Spanish language spoken in most of Chile. Chilean Spanish dialects have distinctive pronunciation, grammar, vocabulary, and slang usages that differ from those of Standard Spanish, with various linguists identifying Chilean Spanish as one of the most divergent varieties of Spanish.
Cuban Spanish is the variety of the Spanish language as it is spoken in Cuba. As a Caribbean variety of Spanish, Cuban Spanish shares a number of features with nearby varieties, including coda weakening and neutralization, non-inversion of Wh-questions, and a lower rate of dropping of subject pronouns compared to other Spanish varieties. As a variety spoken in Latin America, it has seseo and lacks the vosotros pronoun.
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.
The Diccionario de la lengua española is the authoritative dictionary of the Spanish language. It is produced, edited and published by the Royal Spanish Academy, with the participation of the Association of Academies of the Spanish Language. It was first published in 1780, as the Diccionario de la lengua castellana and subsequent editions have been published about once a decade. The twenty-third edition was published in 2014; it is available on-line, incorporating modifications to be included in the twenty-fourth print edition.
Nicaraguan Spanish is geographically defined as the form of Spanish spoken in Nicaragua. Affectionately, Nicaraguan Spanish is often called Nicañol.
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 noun 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.
Stress in Spanish is functional: to change the placement of stress changes the meaning of a sentence or phrase: for example, célebre ('famous'), celebre, and celebré contrast only by stress. There is some minor variance among Spanish dialects; a speaker of Rioplatense Spanish will pronounce boina ('beret') as, but a speaker of Colombian Spanish will pronounce it as and spell it as boína.
The Diccionario Panhispánico de dudas is an elaborate work undertaken by the Royal Spanish Academy and the Association of Academies of the Spanish Language with the goal of resolving questions related to the proper use of the Spanish language. Like other publications of the academy, such as the Diccionario de la lengua española, the work follows a linguistically prescriptive philosophy as opposed to a descriptive one. The first edition was published in 2005 and is now being revised to more properly align with principles set forth by the academy's other publications.
Juliana, better known as the India Juliana, is the Christian name of a Guaraní woman who lived in the newly founded Asunción, in early-colonial Paraguay, known for killing a Spanish colonist between 1539 and 1542. She was one of the many indigenous women who were handed over to or stolen by the Spanish, forced to work for them and bear children. Since the area was not rich in minerals as they had anticipated, the colonists generated wealth through the enslavement and forced labor of indigenous people—especially the sexual exploitation of women of childbearing age.
