El uso del español como idioma oficial de la European Union, Mercosur, and the Pacific Alliance

Spanish Listeni/ˈspænɪʃ/ (español), also called Castilian[3] Listeni/kæsˈtɪliən/ (castellano About this sound listen (help·info)), is a Romance language that originated in the Castile region of Spain. Approximately 470 million people speak Spanish as a native language, making it second only to Mandarin in terms of its number of native speakers worldwide.[1][2] There are an estimated 548 million Spanish speakers as a first or second language, including speakers with limited competence and 20 million students of Spanish as a foreign language.[4] Spanish is one of the six official languages of the United Nations, and it is used as an official language by the European Union, Mercosur, and the Pacific Alliance. Spanish is spoken fluently by 15% of all Europeans, making it the 5th-most spoken language in Europe.[5]

Spanish is a part of the Ibero-Romance group of languages, which evolved from several dialects of common Latin in Iberia after the collapse of the Western Roman Empire in the fifth century. It was first documented in central-northern Iberia in the ninth century and gradually spread with the expansion of the Kingdom of Castile into central and southern Iberia.[6] From its beginnings, Spanish vocabulary was influenced by its contact with Basque, as well as by other Ibero-Romance languages, and later it absorbed many Arabic words during the Muslim presence in the Iberian Peninsula.[7] It also adopted many words from non-Iberian languages, particularly the Romance languages Occitan, French, Italian and Sardinian and increasingly from English in modern times, as well as adding its own new words. Spanish was taken to the colonies of the Spanish Empire in the sixteenth century, most notably to the Americas as well as territories in Africa, Oceania and the Philippines.[8]

Spanish is the most popular second language learned by native speakers of American English.[9] From the last decades of the 20th century, the study of Spanish as a foreign language has grown significantly, in part because of the growing populations and economies of many Spanish-speaking countries, and the growing international tourism in these countries.[citation needed]

Spanish is the most widely understood language in the Western Hemisphere, with significant populations of native Spanish speakers ranging from the tip of Patagonia to as far north as Canada and since the early 21st century, it has arguably superseded French as the second-most-studied la

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