Introduction

STROLLING THROUGH THE WALLED MEDIEVAL city of Toledo in the summer of 2012, we felt like we were in a gigantic open-air history museum. Every corner of the city gave us new insights into Spanish architecture, art, and archaeology, and spoke of the centuries of cultural interplay that forged them.

Indeed, modern Spain is the product of a succession of civilizations that occupied or dominated the Iberian Peninsula over the millennia: Celts, Phoenicians, and Romans were followed by German Visigoths, Arabs, French, and Castilians. As successive empires fought—and even destroyed—one another to gain control of the peninsula, Spain developed from the densely intertwined cultural layers each civilization left behind.

But one element of this story is particularly striking: none of the civilizations that dominated Spain completely erased the legacies of the ones that preceded it. Perhaps the most stunning physical example of this is the sixteenth-century cathedral of Córdoba. Known as the Mezquita-Catedral (Mosque-Cathedral), it consists of a Renaissance cathedral literally carved into the middle of a ninth-century mosque, which is still standing, its 856 columns encircling the cathedral like a forest. Spain is full of such medleys: in the San Román Church in Toledo, Visigoth-style arches face windows bordered in Arabic script. The walls of Seville’s Real Alcázar palace—home to Christian kings since the Middle Ages—are covered with Arabic mosaics.

It was the same mind-boggling mesh of cultural influences that forged the Spanish language.

Spanish started out as a quirky, obscure dialect spoken by a remote tribe of cattle farmers in a northern strip of the peninsula. This tribe went on to become the Kingdom of Castile and León. As the Castilians spread their influence throughout Spain, their language picked up vocabulary, ideas, and structures from the different cultures and societies the Castilians encountered—some of the most ancient texts in Old Spanish vernacular were written in Arabic script. Eventually, these influences blended into the language that would become Spanish. But even before Castilian had evolved into modern Spanish, the language left the shores of the peninsula and started acquiring new features from the civilizations of the New World. In the next centuries, this language spread so widely it would create a Spanish-speaking world ten times the size of Spain.

Today, Spanish is the world’s second or third language with five hundred million speakers. Twenty-one countries use it officially, and Spanish has an important unofficial presence in a twenty-second, the United States. Yet Spanish is still evolving and changing, as the world where it is spoken changes.

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It was the Spanish language itself that inspired us to write this book. Spanish is a cluster of contradictions. Over its history, it became—at once—one of the most organized and systematic tongues in history and a finely honed tool used to express disorder and passion. The tension of these conflicting impulses makes Spanish an irresistible topic for a couple of journalists looking for a good story.

Yet it took us a few decades to build up the courage to tackle the topic.

The first obstacle was a linguistic one: neither of us speaks Spanish as a native language. We were both attracted to Spanish starting in our student days at McGill University, but our first job was to learn one of Canada’s official languages—English for Jean-Benoît and French for Julie. Still, we both studied Spanish at university and practiced it over the years on trips to Latin America and Spain.

Julie’s initial interest in Spanish, which started in the mid-1980s, came from the fact that cold war politics and underdevelopment had made Latin America a top priority for human rights organizations. Years later, when she was studying Spanish in the city of Puebla, Mexico, she was ushered into the peculiar universe of Latin American telenovelas and learned about the addictive TV formula that is carrying Latin American productions to living rooms as far away as Croatia, Israel, and India.

Jean-Benoît’s interest in Spanish was more down-to-earth—in fact, it was underground. In 1987, and again in 1990, he was part of an expedition of cave explorers who traveled to the remote sierra in the backwoods of the state of Puebla. The Mexican peasants he met there, like most of the campesinos of the Sierra Negra, spoke Spanish as a second language. Their mother tongue was Nahuatl, the language of the Aztecs, who were conquered almost five centuries earlier—and were supposedly wiped out.

These early experiences taught us that there was much more to the story of Spanish than conquistadores, revolutions, tango music, and great writers—important as all those are.

Then, years later, our professional experience gave us the tools we needed to write this book. In 2006, we published The Story of French, which explains how the French language evolved, became the language of a country, and then spread to almost every other country on the planet.

The origins of Spanish are similar to those of French. Both languages grew out of the Roman occupation of Western Europe and the “barbarian” invasions of Germanic tribes that followed Rome’s decline. But before the Dark Ages ended, the two languages headed in radically different directions. French was heavily influenced by the language of its Germanic rulers, the Franks, whose dynasty would morph into France’s monarchy. In Spain, the Germanic Visigoths ceded power to the Arabs, who, in turn, were unseated by Christian kings, punctuating the evolution of Spain’s history with radical new influences.

Centuries later, the stories of French and Spanish diverged in another way. The French managed to spread their language across the entire globe. Although Spanish became the mother tongue of many more people, it never took root outside of the Americas.

Today, as an international language, Spanish has an entirely different personality from French. Twice as many people speak Spanish than French. But it is an official tongue in fewer countries than French—twenty-one, as opposed to thirty-six (sixty-three for English). In short, the status of an international language is not determined just by its number of speakers—although that helps.

There’s another contradiction inherent in Spanish. It produced many global household concepts and names—tango, flamenco, Tex-Mex food, Gabriel García Márquez, Pedro Almodóvar, and Shakira are just some obvious examples. Yet as an international language, Spanish has always punched below its weight, particularly in science and technology. Sources differ on the numbers, but many American states produce more patents than the largest Spanish-speaking countries.

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The best word to describe the approach we take to Spanish in this work is biography. We treat Spanish like a character, explaining how it grew up and who and what influenced it over the course of its long life.

As in The Story of French, a number of “sciences” shape the story, notably linguistics and statistics. But they are just part of the story. We did not set out to do a statistical survey of Spanish speakers or to write a book on linguistics. We believe that languages develop and spread not because of their inherent beauty but as a result of many factors. Spanish is not just a product of, but also a player in, history. As the French general Hubert Lyautey famously said to the French Academy in 1912, “A language is a dialect that possesses an army, a navy, and an air force.” In our view, Lyautey’s list should include politics and economics, demographics, visionary leaders, creators, and more.

The expression “empire on which the sun never sets” referred to Spain before it did to Britain, and colonialism was definitely a major force carrying Spain beyond the shores of the Iberian Peninsula. Yet power alone—colonial or otherwise—does not explain how any language becomes international. Power is, in its essence, transient, and the links among power, language, and prestige can be subtle, or even contradictory. Three centuries of Spanish colonialism were not enough to turn Spanish into the main language in the most populous parts of the Spanish Empire, notably Mexico, Peru, Guatemala, Bolivia, Paraguay, and the Philippines. And then, it was the progressive collapse of the Spanish Empire that caused Spanish to spread in these areas.

Another word that describes our approach is anthropological. Anyone who learns a second language or becomes versed in a foreign culture enters a new world. Language is a universe its speakers inhabit, a mental frontier, just as important as ethnicity, religion, or ideology, and just as resilient to change. Language shapes how we organize our thoughts, our lives, and our nations—in short, our world. As we learned writing The Story of French, the mental universe shared by the speakers of any language has some enduring features yet it is constantly affected by political and economic change, technical innovation, and more.

So, while writing this book, we asked: What does it mean to be part of Spanish-speaking culture? What are the traits and features all its speakers share, and where did those come from?

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The catalyst for this book actually came from a visit to Puebla in the spring of 2006, where we met a group of adult learners at a local Spanish-language school. They were all Americans from a variety of professions who had taken time off from their jobs to study Spanish. There was no reason to think they were anything but typical of an off-season student cohort at any Spanish school. And that got us wondering about the curious power of attraction of Spanish. In particular, what could possibly motivate people who spoke English—a language unanimously hailed to be the most powerful and important in the world—to invest all that time and energy in learning the language of a minority in their own country?

Six million Americans learn Spanish (more than all other languages combined) and an estimated fifteen million speak it with a degree of proficiency (this is not counting the thirty-seven million Hispanics who still speak the language). Americans’ desire to speak Spanish is so ubiquitous today that few question it. Yet the phenomenon of Americans studying Spanish does not fit the laws that govern the spread of languages. Statistically, people are drawn to languages that will help them climb a socioeconomic ladder. They choose languages that will bring them power.

What is making Spanish so influential in the United States? Part of the answer lies in the language’s quirky, vibrant, and accessible pop culture. This charisma gives Spanish a special kind of power in the United States, a singular quality that inspires many to learn Spanish. Spanish—literally—makes the world bigger.

This book is our attempt to explain where that world came from.