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Around 75% of modern Spanish vocabulary is derived from Latin, including Latin borrowings from Ancient Greek. Īs a Romance language, Spanish is a descendant of Latin and has one of the smaller degrees of difference from it (about 20%) alongside Sardinian and Italian. Spanish colonialism in the Early Modern Period spurred on the introduction of the language to overseas locations, most notably to the Americas. The oldest Latin texts with traces of Spanish come from mid-northern Iberia in the 9th century, and the first systematic written use of the language happened in Toledo, a prominent city of the Kingdom of Castile, in the 13th century. Spanish is part of the Ibero-Romance group of languages, which evolved from several dialects of Vulgar Latin in Iberia after the collapse of the Western Roman Empire in the 5th century. The largest population of native speakers is in Mexico. It is the world's second-most spoken native language after Mandarin Chinese the world's fourth-most spoken language overall after English, Mandarin Chinese, and Hindustani (Hindi-Urdu) and the world's most widely spoken Romance language. Spanish is the official language of 20 countries. Today, it is a global language with nearly 500 million native speakers, mainly in the Americas and Spain. Spanish ( español or castellano, Castilian) is a Romance language of the Indo-European language family that evolved from colloquial spoken Latin in the Iberian Peninsula of Europe. For an introductory guide on IPA symbols, see Help:IPA. Without proper rendering support, you may see question marks, boxes, or other symbols instead of Unicode characters. This article contains IPA phonetic symbols.
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