‘I love chocolate’ …I know that, but do you know about the origin of the word chocolate?

In my professional teaching experience it’s very common to find out that many students are often unaware about lots of the aspects relating to the nature of the Spanish language vocabulary when they start their learning process.
For example, they often find it surprising that a Spanish word like chocolate or tomate comes from Pre-Columbian languages. [...]

Spanish to be reintroduced as school subject in the Philippines

The website elcastellano.org/noticia informs that Spanish is to make a return to the Philippines’ [...]

Two Pre-Roman phonological features adopted permanently by Spanish

The trilled (very marked and rolled) sound of the combination rr as found in perro, barro [...]

Corpus of Spanish offering 100 million + words

I’ve just opened an email from elcastellano.org reporting of an interview with Dr Mark Davies from [...]

Spanish is the fourth most important language in the world

Yesterday I bought the book Empires of the Word a Language History of the World by Nicholas [...]

The word ‘resiliencia’ came to Spanish via English

Until today I didn’t know that the word ‘resiliencia’ was used in Spanish. I have always used resilience or resilient as terms fully associated with the English language. Then today I received in my mailbox an email from ‘La Palabra del Día’ (www.elcastellano.org/palabra.html), in which as usual for this [...]

Is it called Spanish or Castilian?

When I was a secondary school student, I used to study the subject ‘castellano’ - Castilian, [...]