Expansion of Castilian Spanish

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The prestige of Old Castile and its language was propagated partly by the exploits of Castilian heroes in the battles of the Reconquista — among them Fernán González and Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar (El Cid) — and by the narrative poems about them that were recited in Castilian even outside the original territory of that dialect.

The "first written Spanish" is traditionally considered to have appeared in the Glosas Emilianenses. These are "glosses" (translations of isolated words and phrases in a form more like Spanish than Latin) added between the lines of a manuscript that was written earlier in Latin. Their date, derived by various means, is often estimated as A.D. 978.

The first steps toward standardization of written Castilian were taken in the thirteenth century by King Alfonso X of Castile, known as Alfonso el Sabio. He assembled scribes at his court and supervised their writing, in Castilian, of extensive works on history, astronomy, law, and other fields of knowledge.

Antonio de Nebrija wrote the first grammar of Spanish and presented it, in 1492, to Queen Isabella, who is said to have had an early appreciation of the usefulness of the language as a tool of hegemony, as if anticipating the empire that was about to be founded with the voyages of Columbus.

The Spanish language, like Icelandic, Arabic, and many languages with a classical age, can be read with little help as far back as documents written in the 1100's and before.

The Spanish Royal Academy was founded in 1713, largely with the purpose of preserving the "purity" of the language. The Academy published its first dictionary in six volumes over the period 1726–1739, and its first grammar in 1771, and it continues to produce new editions of both from time to time. Each of the Spanish-speaking countries has an analogous language academy, and an Association of Spanish Language Academies was created in 1951.

The language was brought to the Americas (Latin America, especially Mexico, Central America and western South America), and to the Federated States of Micronesia, Guam, Marianas, Palau and the Philippines, by the Spanish colonization which began in the 16th century. The Spanish failed to exercise land claims over the Solomon Islands and Micronesia, where a map reader can find some geographic place names in Spanish, but no major Spanish cultural influence is felt in distant,[citation needed] often isolated islands in the three centuries of Spanish administrative rule in these areas later acquired by the Germans and Americans by 1900.

The Catholic church preached Christianity to the natives in selected local languages such as Mayan, Aztecan, Guaraní, Quechua and Aymará in the Americas, and Tagalog in the Philippines, rather than Spanish, for ease of conversion and to separate them from the direct influence of the non-missionary Spaniards, held by the church to be "evil", uncivilized and unfavorable for the natives, and to further expand assimilation of natives to the introduced Spanish culture.

In the Americas its usage was continued by the descendants of the Spaniards, whether by the large population of Spanish criollos or by what had then become the mixed Spanish-Amerindian (mestizos) majority. After the wars of independence fought by these colonies in the 19th century, the new ruling elites extended their Spanish to the whole population to strengthen national unity, and the encouragement of all natives to become fluent in Spanish has had a certain amount of success, except in very isolated parts of the former Spanish colonies.

The still Spanish colonies of Cuba and Puerto Rico encouraged more immigrants from Spain in the late 19th century, and similarly other Latin American countries such as Argentina, nearby Uruguay and to a lesser extent Chile, Mexico, Panama and Venezuela, attracted waves of European Spanish and non-Spanish, Caucasian immigration in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. There, the countries' large (or sizable minority) population groups of second- and third-generation descendants adopted the Spanish language as part of their governments' official assimilation policies to include Europeans who were Catholics and agreed to take an oath of allegiance to their chosen nation's government.[citation needed]

In the Philippines, this process did not occur for several reasons. It was isolated as the only Spanish colony in Asia, far removed from all of Spain's colonies in the Americas. Rather than being a direct colony of Spain, the Philippines was in fact a colony of another Spanish colony, New Spain[citation needed], and was administered from Mexico City, thereby lessening the ties and interest of Spain proper, and disabling the large scale Spanish migration experienced across the Americas. From the Spanish claim on these islands in 1535 to the late 1800s, the Philippines was the only "direct" European colony in terms of cultural influences in Southeast Asia.

In comparison to its counterparts in Spanish America, the Philippine population was, and still is, almost exclusively native,[citation needed] and mixed Spanish-Filipinos (Filipino mestizos) were few in number, while Spaniards (of which a great many were actually Mexican Criollos) accounted for even fewer than the Mestizos. Following the Spanish-American War the small number of Spaniards and Latin Americans present in the country eventually returned to New Spain (Mexico) and Spain, or a smaller wave of Hispano-Filipinos had settled in United States–annexed Hawaii and the western U.S. in the early 1900s (see Filipino Americans).[citation needed]

Ultimately, at the culmination of the Philippine-American War many of the already minuscule Mestizo population was decimated as casualties of war. English was then declared an official language. Spanish finally ceased to be an official language of the Philippines in 1973. A creole language called Chabacano developed as a lingua franca in the south when the Spaniards built forts to combat the Muslims and imported workers from all over the country. The local languages, then and now, are not mutually intelligible. However, Spanish like English (but more preferable) is still studied by educated Filipinos and professionals who might emigrate to Mexico.

Unlike the Philippines, when Puerto Rico became a possession of the United States as consequence of the same Spanish-American War, its population was by then almost entirely of Spanish and mixed Afro-Caribbean Spanish (mulatto and mestizo) descent[citation needed], thereby enabling the retention of their inherited Spanish language as a mother tongue while co-existing with the American imposed English as co-official. Puerto Rico has received immigration from Europe, when Spanish colonial officials invited farmers and island fishers from Corsica, the Canary Islands, the Azores, Greece, Malta, Italy and Ireland, while millions of Puerto Ricans went to the mainland U.S. in the 20th century. (see Puerto Rican people and Puerto Ricans in the United States).

A similar situation occurred in the American Southwest including California, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas, where Spaniards, then Californios (Spanish criollos in California) followed by Chicanos (Mexican Americans) and later Mexican immigrants, maintained Spanish alive before, during and after the American appropriation of those territories, since the 1500s. Spanish continues to be used by millions of citizens and immigrants from Latin America to the United States (for example, many Cuban Americans arrived in Miami, Florida beginning in the 1950s and 1960s, and followed by other Latin American groups. The local majority is now Spanish-speaking). Spanish is now treated as the country's "second language," and over 5 percent of the U.S. population are Spanish-speaking, but most Latino/Hispanic Americans are bilingual or also regularly speak English.[citation needed]

In the 20th century, Spanish was introduced in Equatorial Guinea and Western Sahara after periods of Spanish colonial rule, and it is also studied and spoken in former French and Portuguese colonies in Africa and Asia, but it is not the main languages of these areas. It is also spoken in parts of the United States that had not been part of the Spanish Empire, such as Spanish Harlem in New York City, at first by immigrants from Puerto Rico, and later by other Latin American immigrants who arrived there in the late 20th century.

In the Marianas, the Spanish language was retained until the Pacific War, but native inhabitants may speak Chamorro an Austronesian language, some German and later English, Japanese and Korean introduced in the early 20th century, and some languages introduced by immigrants from the Philippines and Southeast Asia.

Language politics in Francoist Spain declared Spanish as the only official language in Spain, and to this day Castilian Spanish is the most preferred language in government, business, public education, cultural arts and the media. But in the 1960s and 1970's, the Spanish parliament agreed to allow provinces to use, speak and print official documents in three other languages: Catalan for Catalonia, Basque, a non Indo-European language for the Basque provinces, and Galician, akin to Portuguese, for Galicia. Since the early 1980s after Spain became a multi-party democracy, these regional and minority languages have rebounded in common usage as secondary languages, but Castilian Spanish remains the universal language of the Spanish people.[citation needed]