Introduction:
In Spain and in some other parts of the Spanish-speaking world, Spanish is called not only español but also Castellano. Spanish or Espanol is spoken widely in Spain, Mexico, Colombia, the USA, Argentina, Cuba, etc. It is a Romance language that originated in the Iberian Peninsula of Europe and it has approximately about 500 million speakers. This makes Spanish one of the most spoken languages in the world today. The ability to speak and write Spanish has many advantages. As 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. Around 75% of modern Spanish vocabulary is derived from Latin, including Latin borrowings from Ancient Greek. Its vocabulary has also been influenced by Arabic, having developed during the Al-Andalus era in the Iberian Peninsula, with around 8% of its vocabulary having Arabic lexical roots. Spanish is one of the six official languages of the United Nations, and it is also used as an official language by the European Union, the Organization of American States, the Union of South American Nations, the Community of Latin American and the Caribbean States, the African Union, and many other international organizations. The alphabet uses the Latin script. The spelling is fairly phonemic, especially in comparison to more opaque orthographies like English, having a relatively consistent mapping of graphemes to phonemes; in other words, the pronunciation of a given Spanish-language word can largely be predicted from its spelling and to a slightly lesser extent vice versa.