The Story of Spanish by Jean-Benoît Nadeau and Julie Barlow (review)

Spanish is the fourth most widely spoken language in the world and a language of increasing importance in the United States. According to the prediction of the experts, the United States will become the world’s largest Spanish-speaking country by 2050. With that in mind, The Story of Spanish is a timely work presenting an account of the engaging evolution and development of the language—including accounts of the peculiarities of varieties of Spanish dialects—and the historical and cultural events that influenced the shaping of the language.

First of all, the readers are introduced to a Guide to Spanish Pronunciation, six black-and-white maps of the different periods in Spanish history (Spain today, la Reconquista 814, la Reconquista 900, la Reconquista 1210, la Reconquista 1360, Latin America Today), and a couple of charts (US Minority Population by Country 2010, US Minority Population Change by Country 2000–2010). Through their personal travels, authors take us through a succession of civilizations that occupied or dominated the Iberian Peninsula over the millennia: Celts, Phoenicians, Romans, Germans, Visigoths, Arabs, French, and Castilians. Some of the examples include the 16th century cathedral of Córdoba, known as the Mezquita-Catedral (Mosque-Cathedral); a Renaissance cathedral carved in the 9th century mosque; and Seville Real Alcázar palace, home to Christian kings. Writers mention that a number of existing current words in Spanish constitute direct borrowings from Arabic, whose lexicon describes a sophisticated irrigation system: atarjea (duct), acequia (irrigation ditch), arcaduz (pipe) and aljibe (cistern), to name a few. Some names that merit readers’ attention are: Antonio de Nebrija, a scholar of Latin who became famous for his Gramática de la lengua castellana in 1492; the missionaries who invented new writing systems to study the native languages in the “New World,” with Bernardino de Sahagún—who compiled a twelve-volume Historia General de las cosas de Nueva España (General History of Things of New Spain) written in Nahuatl and Spanish about Aztecs’ life—leading the way; Fray Domingo de Santo Tomás, who wrote the first grammar of Quechua, the language of the Inca people, in Peru; Venezuelan Andrés Bello, who wrote the well known Gramática de la lengua castellana destinada al uso de los americanos (Grammar of the Castillian Language for the Use of Americans) first published in 1847; and María Molinar, who published Diccionario del uso de español (Diccionary of Spanish Usage) in 1966, among others. It is also noted that Spanish borrowings in English came from the “New World” such as cigar, tomato or mosquito.

Readers will learn about the age of Queen Isabel and King Fernando, Spain’s Catholic monarchs, about Christopher Columbus who explored the New World in 1492, about the Inquisition, and about Spanish Golden Age (Siglo de Oro) and Don Quixote. Readers will also learn about Simón Bolívar, liberator of Venezuela and Colombia, about Spanish dictator Francisco Franco, and about famous Spanish writers such as Miguel de Unamuno of the Generación de 98, and Nobel Prize winners in literature, like Gabriela Mistral and Gabriel García Márquez, among others. They will discover that muralismo is a product of the Mexican revolution, and learn about the lives of entertainment greats such as Pedro Almodóvar and Shakira. Finally, readers will be immersed in the culture itself: tango, flamenco, and Tex-Mex food, all of which are highly visible and widely-known parts of Hispanic culture.

These are all examples of the cultural influences over the course of several centuries that are included in the book and that have contributed to the Spanish that is spoken today by 500 million people in twenty-one countries and, unofficially, in the US and other parts of the globe. In fact, Spanish is still evolving and being molded by the events that unfold in the places where it is spoken.

The Story of Spanish consists of...