Spanish

Spanish (also known as Castilian) is the most widely spoken of the Romance languages, with an estimated 483 million native speakers in 2019, according to the Instituto Cervantes, and at least 75 million second-language speakers. It is an official language of 20 countries.

The main dialect groups of Spanish are:

Peninsular Spanish
- Castilian Spanish
- Andalusian Spanish
Mexican Spanish
Central American Spanish
Caribbean Spanish
Andean Spanish and Pacific Spanish
- Colombian Spanish
- Peruvian Spanish
- Bolivian Spanish
Chilean Spanish
Rioplatense Spanish

Historically, and perhaps extremely marginally to this day, there was also Philippine Spanish.

There are a number of other schisms within the Spanish-speaking world that don’t align so neatly with these boundaries:

Voseo, tuteo, ustedeo
S-aspiration in Spanish (common in southern Spain, the Caribbean, the Cono Sur, and other parts of coastal South America)
Yeísmo and lleísmo (and variations in the pronunciation of the ⟨ll⟩ digraph, whether merged or not with ⟨y⟩)

I started learning Spanish when I started at university, and I persisted with it so long that I ended up making Spanish Studies my major (and did an honours year too!). I’ve continued to work at it, incrementally, in the years since then, although I have to admit I’ve done a lot more reading than writing, speaking or listening. By the CEFR scale, I would estimate my reading ability to be C1 level (I can read novels, and back during my honours year I read a looooot of academic papers in Spanish), my writing to be B2, but my speaking and listening to be B1. I find it a lot easier to chat to people whose accents don’t aspirate ⟨s⟩ than people whose accents do 😛 I also feel I have a much larger passive vocabulary than active, so (if I understand the accent) I can understand more than I can say, at least fluently/off the cuff.