ABSTRACT
Spanish is by far the most widely spoken Romance language. At a conservative estimate, there are now some 325 million native speakers, scattered through all continents, but most densely concentrated in Central and South America, where Spanishspeaking countries form a great swathe from the United States-Mexico border right to Tierra del Fuego. Spanish is the national language of nineteen countries, in descending order of population: Mexico, Colombia, Spain (including the Balearic and Canary Islands and the enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla on the north African coast), Argentina, Peru, Venezuela, Chile, Ecuador, Cuba, Guatemala, Dominican Republic, Bolivia, El Salvador, Honduras, Paraguay, Nicaragua, Uruguay, Costa Rica, Panama. There are large Spanish-speaking minorities in the United States (including the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico, which is predominantly Spanish-speaking), estimated at 25 million but probably higher and certainly growing rapidly. Spanish is also the official language of Equatorial Guinea, and is spoken by significant minorities in Andorra, Belize, Morocco and Western Sahara, Israel and the Balkan countries, the Philippines and Australia. Like all pluricentric languages, Spanish is subject to regional and sociolinguistic var-
iation (some specific features are discussed in Sections 3 and 4 below). Despite some well-publicised heterogeneous characteristics, the range of variation is not very great and only rarely disrupts mutual comprehensibility. Difficulties do, however, arise with the Spanish-lexicon creoles of the Philippines and Colombia, and with Judeo-Spanish, the linguistic consequence of the expulsion of Sephardic communities from Spain in 1492. Sefardí is reputed to have preserved numerous features of fifteenth-century usage, but the claim is exaggerated: some phonetic traits, like the preservation of initial /f-/, are indeed archaic, but the language has evolved extensively in its morphology and has assimilated large numbers of lexical borrowings. In gradual decline for most of the twentieth century, sefardí is now seriously endangered; it has not benefited from migration of the Balkan communities to Israel, where a mildly koineised Latin-American Spanish is thriving and attracting younger speakers.
