
Spanish is also the third most used language on internet websites after English and Chinese.

Spanish does not feature prominently as a scientific language however, it is better represented in areas like humanities and social sciences.

Alongside English and French, it is also one of the most taught foreign languages throughout the world. Around 75% of modern Spanish vocabulary is derived from Latin, including Latin borrowings from Ancient Greek. Īs a Romance language, Spanish is a descendant of Latin and has one of the smaller degrees of difference from it (about 20%) alongside Sardinian and Italian. Modern Spanish was then taken to the viceroyalties of the Spanish Empire beginning in 1492, most notably to the Americas, as well as territories in Africa and the Philippines. The oldest Latin texts with traces of Spanish come from mid-northern Iberia in the 9th century, and the first systematic written use of the language happened in Toledo, a prominent city of the Kingdom of Castile, in the 13th century. Spanish is a part of the Ibero-Romance group of languages of the Indo-European language family, which evolved from several dialects of Vulgar Latin in Iberia after the collapse of the Western Roman Empire in the 5th century. It is the world's second-most spoken native language after Mandarin Chinese, and the world's fourth-most spoken language overall after English, Mandarin Chinese, and Hindi.

Today, it is a global language with nearly 500 million native speakers, mainly in the Americas and Spain. 'Castilian') is a Romance language that originated in the Iberian Peninsula of Europe.

For an introductory guide on IPA symbols, see Help:IPA. Without proper rendering support, you may see question marks, boxes, or other symbols instead of Unicode characters. This article contains IPA phonetic symbols.
