Spanish belongs to the Indo-European language family, which is based on the genealogical classification method (also known as the historical/genetic classification method) which classifies languages based on shared ancestry and helps trace language evolution. One of the periods that contributed words to Spanish through contact with other cultures was in 476 when the Visigoths, a Germanic group, made their way into what is now France and the Iberian Peninsula. They spoke Latin, but they also spoke an East Germanic language, which ended up contributing words to modern Spanish, such as guerra ("war") from "werra" and ganso ("goose") from "gans." In 711, a Muslim army made its way from northern Africa into the southern Iberian Peninsula by crossing the Strait of Gibraltar. One of the most notable characteristics of this influence seen in the Spanish of today are the words beginning with "a-" or "-al," which is the equivalent of “the” in Arabic. In some cases, these words merged with the following noun into single words, which resulted in Spanish words such as: Al kaaddi → alcalde ("mayor"), Al qutun → algodón ("cotton"), and Ar ruzz → arroz ("rice"). Spanning over the next 500 years, Spanish existed together with many Indigenous languages (this was both during the colonial period and in the new nations that formed as the colonies won their independence from Spain). This contact and cultural exchange resulted in American languages continuing to influence the local varieties of Spanish. For example, Nahuatl and Quechua, two of the most widely spoken Indigenous languages, contributed hundreds of “americanisms” that were of Indigenous origin to the standard existing varieties of Spanish. For example, from Nahuatl: aguacate(avocado), cacahuate(peanut), chocolate(chocolate), jitomate(tomato), chicle(chewing gum), coyote(coyote) and from Quechua: alpaca(alpaca), cancha(tennis court), papa(potato), coca(coca leaf), puma(puma, mountain lion) (source: https://www.ling.upenn.edu/courses/Fall_2003/ling001/language_change.html.) These considerations enhance my understanding of Spanish in particular in terms of its association with Indigenous languages and how it has been influenced by them. When I was studying abroad in Chile I was lucky enough to live with a Mapuche host family who spoke Mapudungun and Spanish as their second language, so I have thought about the connection between Latin American and Indigenous cultures more broadly but the linguistic connection specifically was not something I had previously considered in depth. In terms of how Spanish has changed over time, language contact (migration), social differentiation, and assimilation and dissimilation processes have played a role, as they do with the evolution of many languages (source: https://www.ling.upenn.edu/courses/Fall_2003/ling001/language_change.html). Linguists track and predict linguistic changes in a variety of ways, but assimilation (the influence of one sound on an adjacent sound) is understood as the most pervasive process. (source: https://www.ling.upenn.edu/courses/Fall_2003/ling001/language_change.html). Linguists also utilize the comparative method in historical linguistics in order to reconstruct an earlier state of a language on the basis of a comparison of related words and expressions in different languages or dialects derived from it. (source: https://www.britannica.com/science/linguistics/The-comparative-method).
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