What Type of Language is Spanish?

Genetically Spanish is a member of the Indo-European group of languages which also includes English. These languages are spoken by 50% of the population of the world. Other Indo-European languages include the traditional language of , , , , and

. Nearly all the countries in

Europe
are considered Indo-European with the exception of Basque. Basque developed its own language and can not be considered a derivative of any other language. Only about 600,000 people consider Basque their native language.

The Indo-European languages can be further subdivided into the Romance languages and Spanish as well as French and Portuguese are considered Romance languages because they are derived from Latin. These languages have strong similarities in grammar and structure.

Language can also be classified by word order, the order of the sentence structure, in other words the order of the subject, object, and verb. Spanish is flexible but primarily a subject-verb-object or SVO language much like English. In English one would say Joe reads the book. 'Joe' is the subject, 'reads' is the verb, and 'the book' is the object. In Spanish one would say Jose lee el libro. 'Jose' is the subject, 'lee' is the verb and 'el libro' is the object.

However, Spanish is not strictly a SVO language. If the subject can be understood from the context it can be left out. It is not uncommon to emphasize a part of a sentence by changing the word order. Additionally when it comes to pronouns the order changes from SVO Joe reads it – to SOV, in Spanish one would say Jose lo lee. (Jose it reads)

Language can also be classified by word formation. Languages can be isolating which simply means that the word roots don't change as a result of how the word is found in a sentence or in relationship to each other. Language can be inflectional which means that the meaning of the words change to show how they relate to other words in the sentence. Agglutinating is a third way of classifying a language. Word units are combined and the meanings differ considerably depending on the combination of the unit of words.

Viewed as an inflectional language, Spanish also has characteristics of isolationist. Verbs change to reflect singular subjects or plural and also change to show past, present or future tense. This is known as conjugation. The verbs are inflected. The root of the verb remains constant and different endings are attached to the root to demonstrate the time period of the action and who or what is performing the action.

The author of this article Pablo Conway lives in , however he visits on a regular basis to improve his Spanish. He has found the people who live in the Costa de la Luz area of

Western Spain
to be very friendly and willing to assist in his learning the Spanish language. www.spanishbankaccount.com

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