The Spanish Language

Spanish (español) is a Romance language named for its origins as the native tongue of a large proportion of the inhabitants of Spain. It is also named Castilian after the Spanish region of Castile where it originated.

The first documents regarded as precursors of modern Spanish are from the ninth century. The dialects reflected in those documents emerged from the ancestral Vulgar Latin (common Latin), which had been brought to Iberia by the Romans during the Second Punic War around 210 BC, absorbing influences from the native Iberian languages such as Celtiberian, Basque and other paleohispanic languages. Later, it gained other external influences, most notably from the Arabic of the later Al-Andalus period.