Spain, Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Equatorial Guinea, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Uruguay, and Venezuela. Also, Canada, Morocco, the Philippines, and the United States of America.

Spanish is a Romance language. That is, like French and Italian, it descended from the Vulgar (colloquial) Latin spoken by soldiers and shopkeepers in the days of the Roman Empire. Gradually, the way people spoke Latin in the different parts of the Empire took on distinctive traits, becoming dialects of Latin and, eventually, languages in their own right, coexisting with the classical Latin spoken by scholars and the clergy.

Spanish is the particular dialect which arose in the region of Castile. The language spread to other parts of Spain apace with Castillian conquests, and overwhelmed other local dialects. The first written records in Castillian date from the 11th century. Called "jarchas", they are small snippets of Romance which Moorish poets incorporated into their work. The first major instance of literary Spanish is the Song of Mio Cid, an oral epic poem first committed to writing by an anonymous troubadour in the 12th century.

A distinctive feature of Spanish is the large number of Arabic words it incorporated during the centuries long Moorish presence in Spain. In fact, the Moors were not Arabs, but a racial mix of a small number of Arabs (mainly Syrians) and greater numbers of Berbers and descendents of the Ibero-Romans who had lived in Spain before the Muslim invasion. For much of the Moorish period Romance was the lingua franca in both Christian and Muslim Spain.

During the 17th century, Spanish underwent a significant - and very rapid - change in pronunciation. For instance the letter X, as in Don Quixote, was originally pronounced as "sh". Afterwards, it was pronounced with the harsh "h" sound - like clearing your throat - used today, and in writing it came to be spelt J. The initial F in many words, such as "hijo" (son) was dropped, and in writing was replaced by the silent H. The modern pronunciation of Z, as a hard "th", also dates from this time.

You can still get an idea of how Spanish was spoken when Columbus sailed for America by listening to a speaker of Ladino. This is a variant of Spanish spoken by Sephardic Jews, and contains many traits of the language as it was, when the Jews were expelled from Spain at the end of the 15th century.

Spanish coexists with other languages spoken in different regions of the Iberian Peninsula. Catalan and Gallego, like Spanish, are Romance languages. They are not dialects of Spanish, having evolved directly from Latin. Both have significant bodies of written literature. Catalan, the language of the Catalonia region of north-eastern Spain, is more closely related to the Occitan language of southern France than to Spanish. Gallego, spoken in north-western Spain, is similar to Portuguese. Unlike Catalan or Portuguese, Gallego is easy for Spanish speakers to understand, both in its spoken and written form.

Valenciano, Mallorquín and Aragonese are usually considered dialects of Catalan by everyone except people in Valencia, Mallorca and Aragon, who feel that a dialect is somehow a sign of second class citizenship, and therefore prefer to regard the local speech as fully fledged languages. Another Romance language, Bable, was widespread in northern Spain in the middle ages, but today is spoken only in pockets of the Asturian mountains in northern Spain.

Basque, or Euskera, is a different case altogether. Not only is it not a Romance language, it is not even related to the Indo-European family of languages. Basque is one of the oldest languages in Europe, but has always been an eminently oral one, lacking a significant body of literature. The irregular terrain of the Basque Country, encompassing parts of northern Spain and south-western France, gave rise to up to eight different dialects of Basque. The promotion of a standardized Basque language was one of the key issues for the Basque nationalist movement born at the end of the 19th century, but with Franco's repression of regional languages during his regime, Basque became restricted principally to rural areas. Franco's policy also extended to Catalan, whose use in public was prohibited.

The arrival of modern democracy to Spain in the 1970s and the rise of autonomous rule in the different regions led to a revival of local languages, especially in the Basque Country and Catalonia.

Traditionally, in the Spanish alphabet, ch, ll, rr and ñare considered individual letters. In most Spanish dictionaries ch follows c so that copia [copy] and cuchillo [knife] come before chaleco [vest]. The same follows for l and ll, n andñ as well as r andrr (when they occur in the middle of words). In 1995 the Spanish alphabet was revised to eliminate most of the compound letters. Therefore, the Spanish alphabet has all the letters of the English alphabet except for the additional ñ. It is important to note however, that many Latin American countries have not decided to follow Spain's lead in this matter. Also, these traditional letters are still used when spelling aloud.  It is therefore important to know the original standard Spanish alphabet.

• One interesting feature of Spanish is that there are two forms of the verb "to be": estar, which denotes a relatively temporary state, and ser, which denotes a relatively permanent condition and which is also used before a predicate noun. Reflexive verbs often perform the same function in Spanish that passive verbs do in English. Each verb tense has its own endings for each person: first, second, or third; singular and plural; hence subject pronouns are not necessary.
• Another peculiarity of Spanish is the use of an inverted question mark (¿) at the beginning of a question and of an inverted exclamation point (¡) at the beginning of an exclamation.