Languages of the Iberian Peninsula: Syntax and Context (2024)

FAQs

What language do they speak in the Iberian Peninsula? ›

The Iberian Peninsula is host to a number of languages. These include not only Spanish and European Portuguese, the dominant languages in Spain and Portugal, respectively, but also minoritized languages such as Galician, Basque, Catalan, and others.

Spanish and Portuguese have deeply intertwined histories. As romance languages, they both come from Latin, which is one of the reasons they're so similar. However, modern Spanish comes from the Castillian family of languages, while modern Portuguese comes from the Old Galician-Portuguese family.

The geological history of the Iberian Peninsula has given rise to mountains forming large chains that surround a high inland plateau situated at over 600 metres above average sea level. As a result of this geography, the peninsula is characterised by a rich variety of unique enclaves and natural environments.

This is because Portuguese has a different alphabet, which includes some letters that are not found in the other Romance languages. As a result, Portuguese has a distinct sound that sets it apart from the other Romance languages.

The Iberian scripts are the Paleohispanic scripts that were used to represent the extinct Iberian language. Most of them are typologically unusual in that they are semi-syllabic rather than purely alphabetic.

The language known today as Spanish is derived from spoken Latin, which was brought to the Iberian Peninsula by the Romans after their occupation of the peninsula that started in the late 3rd century BC. Today it is the world's 4th most widely spoken language, after English, Mandarin Chinese and Hindi.

1. Mandarin Chinese. Interestingly, the hardest language to learn is also the most widely spoken native language in the world. Mandarin Chinese is challenging for a number of reasons.

Short answer — a lot. About 89% of their vocabulary is similar. That's why if you speak Portuguese and try and read a text in Spanish, you can understand almost everything.

Dutch, Frisian, and German stand as the nearest kin to English, with Frisian holding the strongest resemblance. The syntax, lexicon, and phonetics of both Frisian and English demonstrate their shared lineage.

Ibe·​ri·​an ī-ˈbir-ē-ən. 1. a. : of or relating to the peoples anciently inhabiting parts of the peninsula comprising Spain and Portugal or to their languages. The people known to scholars as Iberians seem to have been located primarily along the east coast of Spain … .

What is a person born on the Iberian Peninsula? ›

Peninsulares were defined as those of pure blood and white Spanish descent who lived in the colonies but had been born in Spain, on the Iberian Peninsula. They immigrated to the colonies after birth and held the most important positions in colonial government.

The ancestry of modern Iberians (comprising the Spanish and Portuguese) is consistent with the geographical situation of the Iberian Peninsula in the South-west corner of Europe, showing characteristics that are largely typical in Southern and Western Europeans.

While the majority of lexical differences between Spanish and Portuguese come from the influence of the Arabic language on Spanish vocabulary, most of the similarities and cognate words in the two languages have their origin in Latin, but several of these cognates differ, to a greater or lesser extent, in meaning.

In all aspects—phonology, morphology, lexicon and syntax—Portuguese is essentially the result of an organic evolution of Vulgar Latin with some influences from other languages, namely the native Gallaecian and Lusitanian languages spoken prior to the Roman domination.

Spanish and Italian are 82 percent similar — not too bad. But in comparison, Spanish and Portuguese, the two closest cousins, are 89 percent similar.

Iberia is white, race-wise and Hispanic (mostly) culture-wise. The inhabitants of the Iberian peninsula, Portuguese and Spaniards, are white. Brazilians are of Iberian descent, but not Hispanic, their ancestors came from Portugal. Hispanic is derived from “Hispania”, the ancient name of Spain.

The Ladino language, also referred to as Judeo-Spanish, Sephardi, or Judezmo is the Romance language spoken by the Sephardic Jews, originating from Iberian Jews exiled from Spain and Portugal.

Learn about this topic in these articles:

The Moors speak Ḥassāniyyah Arabic, a dialect that draws most of its grammar from Arabic and uses a vocabulary of both Arabic and Arabized Amazigh words.

Iberian, like all the other Paleohispanic languages except Basque, was extinct by the 1st to 2nd centuries AD. It had been replaced gradually by Latin, following the Roman conquest of the Iberian Peninsula.