The Spanish personal pronouns tú and vos

Many modern American Spanish language varieties use the personal pronoun vos instead of tú when referring to the grammatical second person. The pronoun Vos is the predominant, if not the only form used by an enormous amount of Spanish speakers in many countries. This usage is especially evident in ordinary day [...]

The aspiration or loss of /s/ syllable final in spoken Spanish

The aspiration or loss of the /s/ sound in a final position of a word is a natural phonological feature found in many varieties of Iberian and American Spanish.
This language phenomenon is marked by an aspiration or dropping of the /s/ when speakers articulate structures like los niños, las [...]

Ladino: A Judeo Spanish-Iberian language preserved for more than five centuries

I’ve always been aware of the existence of Ladino or also known as Judeo Spanish, but it was only today that I managed to have a first contact not only with its written but also its spoken forms in a simultaneous way. And it couldn’t have been in a more magnificent fashion than through [...]

Read excellent posts & comments on the blog Hablas español from the BBC

The BBC website has an excellent page named Los blogs de BBC Mundo. Obviously all the blogs are written in Spanish, although some commentaries are sometimes written in English.
There are several blogs dealing with the topic of languages. The more interesting blog for me is Hablas español, because of [...]

The lexical wealth of the Spanish language

In my long experience of teaching Spanish, I have witnessed the amazed reaction of students learning this language whenever the issue of synonyms and the abundant number of idiomatic expressions with which Spanish is endowed arises. I’d like deal in this post with the richness of the lexical or vocabulary aspect of Spanish.
The Castilian language [...]

The intrinsic value of speaking other languages and of being bilingual

A few days ago I read an article in The [...]

‘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. [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]