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Spanish linguistic data
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Common questions about Spanish
What linguistic data does this Spanish page show?
Word order, tone, gender count, case marking, adposition direction, syllable structure, consonant inventory traits, vowel system, morphological alignment, script, register stratification, speaker count, and geographic area. Each row is one feature with Spanish's value visible; you can add other languages to read the same feature side by side.
Where do the Spanish data points come from?
Typological features are merged from URIEL+ (Mortensen et al.) and a curated set authored against descriptive grammars. Speaker counts come from Ethnologue and Glottolog. Geographic area is computed from the Asher 2007 world language atlas. Similarity scores combine genetic distance, typological overlap, and lexical-borrowing data.
How many verb forms does Spanish have?
Around 50+ inflected forms per regular verb across the indicative (5 simple tenses), subjunctive (2 simple tenses, plus rarely-used imperfect subjunctive in -ra/-se), conditional, imperative, plus compound tenses with haber and gerund/participle constructions. The subjunctive remains productive in spoken Spanish unlike English's residual one.
What's the difference between ser and estar?
Both translate as 'to be' but encode different aspects of the verb's meaning. Ser marks identity, classification, and inherent traits (es médico 'he is a doctor'); estar marks location, ongoing states, and transient conditions (está cansado 'he is tired'). Mixing them up changes meaning rather than producing ungrammaticality: es aburrido 'he is boring' versus está aburrido 'he is bored'.
Why does Spanish have such a high similarity score with Portuguese?
Both descend from Vulgar Latin spoken on the Iberian peninsula and diverged late. They share lexicon (~89% cognate), genetic family (West Iberian Romance), and most typology (SVO, two genders, similar verb morphology). Portuguese diverged on phonology (heavy nasalization, more vowel reductions) and the personal infinitive Spanish lacks. The factor breakdown chip on the row tells you which dimensions contributed most.
Sources for Spanish
The grammatical descriptions on this page are informed by the following published reference and descriptive grammars. Grammatical facts themselves are not subject to copyright; the scholars who documented them deserve attribution.
- Butt, John & Benjamin, Carmen (2004). A New Reference Grammar of Modern Spanish, 4th ed. London: Arnold.
- Whitley, M. Stanley & González, Luis (2007). Gramática para la composición, 2nd ed. Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press.
- Real Academia Española & Asociación de Academias de la Lengua Española (2010). Nueva gramática de la lengua española. Madrid: Espasa.
- Penny, Ralph (2002). A History of the Spanish Language, 2nd ed. Cambridge University Press.