Languages of Spain

As you can probably guess, Spanish is the official language of Spain.  But one of the things that makes Spain interesting is the fact that even though Spanish (called castellano, or "Castilian" in Spain) is the predominant language and just about everyone in Spain speaks it, there are three other official languages, or co-official languages.  There are also a few others that are spoken by small amounts of people.  Asturleonese, Aragonese and Aranese (Occitan) are probably the most important of these, though no more than a couple thousand people, mostly in small towns and villages, speak them on a regular basis.

In the map to the right, you can see that purple represents areas where only Spanish is spoken, using different shades to represent different accents.  The darker purple in the north is where the strongest Castilian accent is spoken (considered the purest by Spanish speakers).  Out of the other languages, Galician (in blue), Basque (green) and Catalan (orange) are official languages in Spain.  In the parts of Spain where these languages are spoken, all the street signs are in both Spanish and the other language, and there are many options in public schools to be taught in them.

Both Galician (gallego in Spanish) and Catalan (catalán) are Romance languages, just like Spanish, which means they all come from Latin.  Galician is very similar to Portuguese, and Catalan is very close to French and Italian.  Basque (vasco, or euskera), however, is the only one that does not come from Latin, and is considered a linguistic isolate, meaning it is unrelated to any other language in the world.  It is also said to be one of the oldest languages in the world!  The speakers of these languages tend to be very proud to speak them, though most of them, especially in large cities, do also speak Spanish.