Influences on the Spanish language

The Spanish language has a long history of borrowing words, expressions and subtler features of other languages it has come in contact with.

Spanish developed from Vulgar Latin, with influence from Celtiberian, Basque and Arabic, in the north of the Iberian Peninsula.

Formative influences

As Spanish went through its first stages of development in Spain, it received influences from neighbouring related languages, and from Basque, which is a language isolate and thus completely unrelated to Spanish. Umbrian and Oscan influences have also been postulated.

Visigothic

Spain was controlled by the Visigoths between the 5th and 8th century. However, the linguistic influence of the Visigothic language (of Eastern Germanic origin) on Spanish was relatively small, because the invaders were already Romanized and also spoke their own dialect of Latin. Besides a few words, Spanish borrowed the following from Visigothic:

• A new noun declension (nominative -â, oblique -âne), which was used mostly with proper names (whence modern Spanish Froilán and also guardián).
• The adjectivizing suffix -engo (Germanic -ing), as in abolengo.
• Possibly the suffixes -iz, -ez, -oz, now found in surnames (Pérez, López, Ruiz, etc.), from Germanic patronymics in -iks.

Arabic

Spain was then (711 CE) invaded by Islamic forces, which brought the Arabic language to the Peninsula. Over the course of the following centuries, Spanish borrowed a huge amount of words from Arabic, in many semantic fields:

• Common everyday items such as alcoba "alcove, room", aldea "village", alfombra "carpet", almohada "pillow", guitarra "guitar";
• Government and military terms such as alcázar "fortress", alcalde "mayor"
• Legal terms such as asesino "assassin, murderer", rehén "hostage", tarifa "tariff, fee";
• Food and beverage names such as aceite "oil", arroz "rice", espinaca "spinach", naranja "orange", café "coffee";
• Chemical substances and materials such as alcohol "alcohol", álcali "alkali", adobe "adobe", laca "lacquer";
• Mathematical and astronomical terms such as cero "zero", cifra "cipher, figure", álgebra "algebra", cénit "zenith";
• Expressions such as ojalá ("may it be that...", originally "May Allah want...").

As is obvious, many of these borrowings (especially in the scientific field) were then passed on to other languages (English got most of them via French).

Morphological borrowing was scarce. The suffíx -í (deriving adjectives from place names, in as iraquí "Iraqi, Iraq's") is an example.

Influences from Native American languages

The last Moorish kingdom fell to Spanish forces in 1492, shortly before the arrival of Cristopher Columbus to the Americas. Spanish settlers then came in contact with a host of native languages. Most of these were wiped out or severely reduced in number of speakers and distribution area during the conquest, but Spanish adopted a number of words from some of them:

• tomate "tomato", chocolate "chocolate", ajolote "axolotl", cacao "cocoa", coyote "coyote" from Nahuatl
• cóndor "condor" from Quechua kuntur, and also alpaca, caucho, coca "coke", guano, gaucho (from wakcha "poor person"), guanaco, lima "lime", llama (the animal), puma, pampa "plains, flat terrain", etc.
• mate (an infusion, nowadays very popular in Argentina, Uruguay and Paraguay), also from Quechua mati, "pumpkin")
• che (an addressing term in Rioplatense Spanish), from the Guaraní word for "I" or "my", originally used as che amigo "my friend"
• jaguar and yaguareté "jaguar", also from Guaraní
• caimán "caimán" and huracán "hurricane" from Carib
• caníbal "cannibal", capibara (the largest rodent on Earth), jacarandá (a tree) from Tupi

The list is by no means exhaustive.

Modern borrowings

Spanish borrowed words from other European languages (its close neighbors such as Catalan, other Romance languages like French and Italian, and Germanic languages like English).

Recent borrowings

In recent times, Spanish has borrowed many words and expressions from English, especially in the fields of computers and the Internet. In many cases, technical expressions which superficially employ common Spanish words are in fact calques from English equivalents. For example, disco duro is a literal translation of "hard disk". Words like blog and weblog are used, though bitácora (akin to a captain's log on a boat) is also common.

Sources

• Spanish Words Derived from Arabic, from About.com.
• Amerindian Words in English, compiled by Mark Rosenfelder.
• A History of the Spanish language (sample from the second edition, 2002), by Ralph Penny