Spanish (español) or Castilian language belongs to the group of Romance languages and it is the fourth most important language in the world according to the number of speakers.
Spanish is the native language of 352 million of people and there are more than 500 million of speakers of this melodic language worldwide and therefore it is the third most widely spoken language, after Chinese and English. Spanish, as an official language, is used in the European Union, the UN and many other international organizations. According to global statistics, Spanish is the third most commonly used language on the Internet.
Apart from Spain, it is spoken in over 20 countries of Latin America. According to the latest research, this language has the highest rate of growth in the number of speakers and itis considered that it might eventually surpass even English.
Basically, Castilian and Spanish are synonyms. The word Castilian is connected with the region of its origin, that is Castille and the use of this word is older than the use of the word "Spanish".
After Latin, Arabic had the greatest impact on the development of the Spanish language. It is estimated that around 4000 words in modern Spanish came from Arabic, which was brought to Spain from North Africa by the Moors.