Spanish people

Christian (Mostly  Roman Catholicism 76%)
No religion 13% · Atheism 7.3% · other faith 2.1% incl. 
 Jewish ·  Muslim ·  Buddhist ·  Hinduism

The term Spanish people (or Spaniards) has two distinct meanings: Traditionally, it applies to people native to any part of Spain. More recently, it has also come to have a legal meaning, referring to people who hold Spanish citzenship.

Within Spain there are a number of nationalisms and regionalisms, reflecting the country's complex history. The official language of Spain is Spanish (also known as Castilian), a standard language based on the mediaeval dialect of the Castilians of north-central Spain. There are several commonly spoken regional languages. With the exception of Basque, the languages native to Spain are Romance languages.

There are substantial populations outside Spain with ancestors who emmigrated from Spain; most notably in Latin America.

Historical background

Early populations

The earliest modern humans inhabiting Spain are believed to have been Neolithic peoples who may have arrived in the Iberian Peninsula as early as 35,000­–40,000 years ago. In more recent times the Iberians are believed to have arrived or developed in the region between the 4th millennium BC and the 3rd millennium BC, initially settling along the Mediterranean coast. Celts settled in Spain during the Iron Age. Some of those tribes in North-central Spain, which had cultural contact with the Iberians, are called Celtiberians. In addition, a group known as the Tartessians and later Turdetanians inhabited southwestern Spain and who are believed to have developed a separate civilization of Phoenician influence. The seafaring Phoenicians, Greeks, and Carthaginians successively founded trading colonies along the Mediterranean coast over a period of several centuries. The Second Punic War between the Carthaginians and Romans was fought mainly in what is now Spain and Portugal.^[7]

The Roman Republic conquered Iberia during the 2nd and 1st centuries BC transformed most of the region into a series of Latin-speaking provinces. As a result of Roman colonization, the majority of local languages, with the exception of Basque, stem from the Vulgar Latin that was spoken in Hispania (Roman Iberia), which evolved into the modern languages of the Iberian Peninsula, including Castilian, which became the main lingua franca of Spain, and is now known in most countries as Spanish. Hispania emerged as an important part of the Roman Empire and produced notable historical figures such as Trajan, Hadrian, Seneca and Quintilian.

The Germanic Vandals and Suebi, with part of the Iranic Alans under King Respendial, arrived en masse in the peninsula in 409 AD. It is widely believed that the Vandals may have given their name to the region of Andalusia formerly known as Baetica, which according to one of several theories of its etymology which would be the source of Al-Andalus, the Arabic name of the Iberian peninsula. Part of the Vandals with the remaining Alans, now under Geiseric in personal union removed themselves to North Africa after a few conflicts with another Germanic tribe, the Visigoths, who established in Toulouse supported Roman campaigns against the Vandals and Alans in 415–19 AD and became the dominant power in Iberia for three centuries. The Visigoths were highly romanized in the eastern Empire and already Christians, so their integration within the late Iberian-Roman culture was full; they accepted the laws and structures of the late Roman World with little change, more than any other successor barbarian state in the West after the Ostrogoths, and all the more so after abandoning the Arian cult. The other Germanic tribe remaining in the peninsula, the Suebi (including the Buri), became established according to sources as federates of the Roman Empire in the old North western Roman province of Gallaecia, but in fact largely independent and predatory on neighboring provinces to stretch their political control over ever-larger portions of the southwest after the Vandals and Alans left, creating a totally independent Suebic Kingdom. After being checked and reduced in 456 AD by the Visigoths moving to settle in the peninsula, it survived until 585 AD, when it was annihilated as an independent political unit by the Visigoths, after involvement in the internal affairs of the kingdom, supporting Catholic rebellions and sedition within the Royal family. The Suebi became the first Germanic kingdom to convert officially to Roman Catholicism in 447 AD. under king Rechiar.

Middle Ages

After two centuries of domination by the Visigothic Kingdom, the Iberian Peninsula was invaded by Muslim armies in 711. These armies consisted mainly of Berbers with prominent Arab tribal leaders amongst them and were commonly known as the Moors. They conquered nearly all of the peninsula except for the Christian Kingdom of Asturias in the far north. Muslim controlled areas of Iberia became known as Al-Andalus. The duration of Muslim rule varied greatly, from as little as twenty two years in the Northwest of the peninsula to 781 years in the far south. For the first three centuries of Muslim rule, the peninsula's Christian kingdoms in the north were very much on the defensive, but eventually after the break-up of Muslim unity in the 11th century, the Muslims were driven south in a long process that historians term the Reconquista, which ended with their final capitulation in 1492.

In the first two centuries of Al-Andalus, Muslims formed a ruling minority. Another minority, present since Roman times, were the Jews. In the 10th century a massive conversion of the population from Christianity to Islam took place, so that muladies comprised the majority of the population by the century's end.^[8] However, the process began to reverse as the Christian reconquest gathered pace. Ultimately, Jews and Muslims either converted to Catholicism or were expelled from Spain in 1492 and 1502, following the completion of the Reconquista. Between 1609 and 1614, approximately 300,000 Moriscos—new Christians forcibly converted from Islam who continued to speak, write, and dress like Muslims—were expelled.^[9]

In 842, another group of Arabian tribes, Amazigh or Berber, invaded the peninsula. They attacked Cádiz in 844. These Amazigah were hispanised in all Christian kingdoms, while they kept their ethnic identity and culture in Al-Andalus.^[10]

The union of the Christian kingdoms of Castile and Aragon and the conquest of Granada led to the formation of the Spanish state as we know it today and thus to the development of Spanish identity in the form of one people. The Canary Islands had an indigenous population called the Guanches, whose origin is still the subject of discussion among historians and linguists.

Colonialism and emigration

In the 16th century, following the military conquest of most of the new continent, perhaps 240,000 Spaniards entered American ports. They were joined by 450,000 in the next century.^[11] Since the conquest of Mexico and Peru these two regions became the principal destinations of Spanish colonial settlers in the 16th century.^[12] In the period 1850–1950, 3.5 million Spanish left for the Americas, particularly Argentina, Uruguay, Mexico,^[13] Brazil, Chile, Venezuela, and Cuba.^[14] From 1840 to 1890, as many as 40,000 Canary Islanders emigrated to Venezuela.^[15] 94,000 Spaniards chose to go to Algeria in the last years of the 19th century, and 250,000 Spaniards lived in Morocco at the beginning of the 20th century.^[14]

By the end of the Spanish Civil War, some 500,000 Spanish Republican refugees had crossed the border into France.^[16] From 1961 to 1974, at the height of the guest worker in Western Europe, about 100,000 Spaniards emigrated each year.^[14]

The peoples of Spain

Genetic studies, both autosomal and of haplogroup markers, show clearly that native Spaniards are closely related to the rest of Europe, and in particular with the population groups of the Atlantic littoral: France, Britain, Ireland, and its Iberian neighbour, Portugal.^[17] As a western country, Spain shares strong cultural relationships with the rest of the Western world that extends back to the common medieval and Roman inheritances; but it has especially strong cultural relations with Latin America and the countries of Latin Europe, especially Italy, Portugal, and France.

The genetic signatures of people in Spain and Portugal provide new and explicit evidence of the mass conversions of Sephardi Jews and Muslims to Catholicism in the 15th and 16th centuries after Christian armies wrested Spain back from Muslim control. Geneticists have recently found that 20% of the population of the Iberian Peninsula has Sephardic Jewish ancestry and 11% percent have DNA reflecting Moorish ancestors.^[18]

Nationalisms and regionalisms

Within Spain, there are various regional populations including the Castilians, the Catalans, Valencians and Balearics (who speak Catalan, a distinct Romance language in eastern Spain), the Basques (who live in the Basque country and speak Basque, a non-Indo-European language), and the Galicians (who speak Galician, a descendant of old Galician-Portuguese).

Respect to the existing cultural pluralism is important to many Spaniards. In many regions there exist strong regional identities such as Asturias, Aragon, the Canary Islands, León, and Andalusia, while in others (like Catalonia, Basque Country or Galicia) there are stronger national sentiments.

Regional ethnic groups

• Andalusian people
• Aragonese people
• Asturian people
• Balearic people
• Basque people
• Canarian people
• Cantabrian people
• Castilian people
• Catalan people
• Extremaduran people
• Galician people
• Leonese people
• Valencian people

The Roma

Spain is home to one of the largest communities of Romani people (commonly known by the English exonym "gypsies", Spanish: gitanos). The Spanish Roma, which belong to the Iberian Kale subgroup (calé), are a formerly-nomadic community, which spread across Western Asia, North Africa, and Europe, first reaching Spain in the 15th century.

Spanish Roma, for a number of historical and cultural reasons are not considered a separate or "foreign" population in Spain, but a distinct ethnicity constituting one of the populations native to Spain. Roma play an important role in particularly Andalusian folklore, music, and culture.

There are no official statistics on the Roma population, but estimates fluctuate between 600,000 and 1,500,000, with the Spanish government's estimating a number between 650,000 and 700,000. Most Spanish Roma live in the autonomous community of Andalusia, where they have traditionally enjoyed a higher degree of integration than in the rest of the country. A number of Spanish Kale also live in Southern France, especially in the region of Perpignan.

Modern immigration

The population of Spain is becoming increasingly diverse due to recent immigration. From 2000 to 2010, Spain had among the highest per capita immigration rates in the world and the second highest absolute net migration in the World (after the USA)^[19] and immigrants now make up about 10% of the population. Since 2000, Spain has absorbed more than 3 million immigrants, with thousands more arriving each year.^[20] Immigrant population now tops over 4.5 million.^[21] They come mainly from Europe, Latin America, China, the Philippines, North Africa, and West Africa.^[22]

Languages

Languages spoken in Spain include Spanish (castellano or español) (74%), Catalan (català, called valencià in the Valencian Community) (17%), Galician (galego) (7%), and Basque (euskara) (2%).^[23] Other languages are Asturian (asturianu), Aranese Gascon (aranés), Aragonese (aragonés), and Leonese, each with their own various dialects. Spanish is the official state language, although the other languages are co-official in a number of autonomous communities.

Peninsular Spanish is largely considered to be divided into two main dialects: Castilian Spanish (spoken in the northern half of the country) and Andalusian Spanish (spoken mainly in Andalusia). However, a large part of Spain, including Madrid, Extremadura, Murcia, and Castile-La Mancha, speak local dialects known as "transitional dialects" between Andalusian and Castilian Spanish.^[24] The Canary Islands also have a distinct dialect of Castilian Spanish which is very close to Caribbean Spanish. Linguistically, the Spanish language is a Romance language and is one of the aspects (including laws and general "ways of life") that causes Spaniards to be labelled a Latin people. The strong Arabic influence on the language (nearly 4,000 words are of Arabic origin, many nouns and few verbs)^[25] and the independent evolution of the language itself through history, most notably the Basque influence at the formative stage of Castilian Romance, partially explain its difference from other Romance languages. The Basque language left a strong imprint on Spanish both linguistically and phonetically. Other changes in Spanish have come from borrowings from English and French, although English influence is stronger in Latin America than in Spain.

The number of speakers of Spanish as a mother tongue is roughly 35.6 million, while the vast majority of other groups in Spain such as the Galicians, Catalans, and Basques also speak Spanish as a first or second language, which boosts the number of Spanish speakers to the overwhelming majority of Spain's population of 46 million.

Spanish was exported to the Americas due to over three centuries of Spanish colonial rule starting with the arrival of Christopher Columbus to Santo Domingo in 1492. Spanish is spoken natively by over 400 million people and spans across most countries of the Americas; from the Southwestern United States in North America down to Tierra del Fuego, the southernmost region of South America in Chile and Argentina. A variety of the language, known as Judaeo-Spanish or Ladino (or Haketia in Morocco), is still spoken by descendants of Sephardim (Spanish and Portuguese Jews) who fled Spain following a decree of expulsion of Moors and Jews in 1492. Also, a Spanish creole language known as Chabacano, which developed by the mixing of Spanish and native Tagalog and Cebuano languages during Spain's rule of the country through Mexico from 1565 to 1898, is spoken in the Philippines (by fewer than 1 million people).

Anti-Franco political dissidents from Spain who moved to Russia during World War II speak a mix of Russian and Spanish, while some speak Catalan and Basque. In Montreal (Quebec, Canada), many Spanish-speaking immigrants relocated in the city adapted a mixed language Franspanol, while they're able to speak French and in addition, English. The Spanish language is also found in small communities of Africa, Australia and New Zealand.

Religion

According to several sources (Spanish official polls and others, www.ine.es), about 76% self-identify as Christian Catholics, about 2% with another religious faith, and about 19% identify as atheists.

Emigration from Spain

Outside of Europe, Latin America has the largest population of people with ancestors from Spain. These include people of full or partial Spanish ancestry.

People with presumed Spanish ancestry

The listings above shows the ten countries with know collected data on people with presumed ancestors from Spain, although the definitions of each of these are somewhat different and the numbers cannot really be compared. Spanish Chilean of Chile and Spanish Uruguayan of Uruguay could be included by percentage (each at above 40%) instead of numeral size.

See also

Footnotes

References

• Castro, Americo. Willard F. King and Selma Margaretten, trans. The Spaniards: An Introduction to Their History. Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 1980. ISBN 0520041771.
• Chapman, Robert. Emerging Complexity: The Later Pre-History of South-East Spain, Iberia, and the West Mediterranean. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. ISBN 0521232074.
• Goodwin, Godfrey. Islamic Spain. San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1990. ISBN 0877016925.
• Harrison, Richard. Spain at the Dawn of History: Iberians, Phoenicians, and Greeks. New York: Thames & Hudson, 1988. ISBN 0500021112.
• James, Edward (ed.). Visigothic Spain: New Approaches. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980. ISBN 0198225431.
• Thomas, Hugh. The Slave Trade: The History of the Atlantic Slave Trade 1440–1870. London: Picador, 1997. ISBN 033035437X.