Some interesting facts about the Spanish language

Spanish is considered to be one of the most studied languages in the world. So if you are planning to improve your Spanish then you might like to know some interesting facts about it.

1. Spanish is the official language in 22 countries and is one of the most spoken languages in the world after Mandarin Chinese. According to Cervantes Institute Spanish is spoken by more than 550 million people and this number is constantly increasing. The largest Spanish speaking country is Mexico with a population of more than 120 million people, followed by Colombia, Spain and Argentina.
2. Spanish belongs to the Romance group of languages which also includes Italian, Portuguese, French, Romanian and some other languages. It is believed that it began to derive from Latin between thesith and the ninth century A.D.
3. The first collection of grammatical rules of the Spanish language - "Grammatica castellana" - was published in 1492 by the Spanish philologist, historian and poet Elio Antonio de Nebrija (Elio Antonio de Nebrija). The same year Columbus discovered America.
4. Another interesting fact is that almost 8% of internet users communicate in Spanish. It´s the second most used language of  Wikipedia and popular social networks such as Facebook and Twitter.
5. Besides Latin, the Spanish language was also influenced by the Arabic language (there are about 4000 Arabic words in Spanish). Today the greatest influence on Spanish is caused by the English language. Hundreds of English words related to technology and culture are borrowed.
6. Thanks to the abundance of vowels, Spanish is considered to be one of the fastest languages in the world. This can cause certain problems for the students when they try to understand the speech of the average native speaker of the language.
7. The most common Spanish letters are "E", "A", "O", "L", "S", most of which are vowels. The most rarely used letter is "W", which occurs exclusively in words of foreign origin and can be found in only 0,01% of the Spanish words.
8. The longest word in Spanish (according to the Royal Academy of Spanish language) is "electroencefalografista" ("electroencephalographist", a person who studies the state of the brain through electroencephalography). In general, the language is characterized by having short words, which are not too difficult to pronounce. In this issue, Spanish is the exact opposite of German.