It is a Romance language derived from Latin and belongs to Italic branch of Indo-European family of languages. Approximate number of speakers of this language is 400-500 million. It is the official language of most Latin American countries. Around 21 nations use Spanish as their first language. It is also one of the six official languages of United Nations. Mexico is the largest Spanish speaking countries in the world most popular among foreign languages in United States. It is fourth most spoken language in the world.
Historically it was evolved from the Kingdom of Castile and developed by becoming language of government and trade and hence the name Castilian is also used. The name Castellano is also used as an alternate name for Spanish. Spanish and Portuguese are considered very similar in terms of vocabulary and grammar since they share common history of Islamic rule. Their lexical similarity is estimated to be as close as 89% while lexical similarity of Spanish is 82% with Italian. It is regarded as a stress language in which stress patterns play deciding role in pronunciation of a word. It is comparatively and inflected language with two genders: masculine, feminine and uses prepositions. Sentence structure is Subject-Verb-Object though other variation is possible and usually places adjectives after nouns.
