Iberian Romance languages in the context of "Gibraltar"

Spanish (español) or Castilian (castellano) is a Romance language of the Indo-European language family that evolved from the Vulgar Latin spoken on the Iberian Peninsula of Europe. It originated in the Kingdom of Castile, a historical kingdom in north-central Spain. Today, it is a global language with 519 million native speakers, mainly in the Americas and Spain, and about 636 million speakers total, including second-language speakers. Spanish is the official language of 20 countries, as well as one of the six official languages of the United Nations. Spanish is the world's second-most spoken native language after Mandarin Chinese; the world's fourth-most spoken language overall after English, Mandarin Chinese, and Hindustani (Hindi-Urdu); and the world's most widely spoken Romance language. The country with the largest population of native speakers is Mexico.

Spanish is part of the Ibero-Romance language group, in which the language is also known as Castilian (castellano). The group evolved from several dialects of Vulgar Latin in Iberia after the collapse of the Western Roman Empire in the 5th century. The oldest Latin texts with traces of Spanish come from mid-northern Iberia in the 9th century, and the first systematic written use of the language happened in Toledo, a prominent city of the Kingdom of Castile, in the 13th century. Spanish colonialism in the early modern period spurred the introduction of the language to overseas locations, most notably to the Americas.

Portuguese (endonym: português or língua portuguesa) is a Western Romance language of the Indo-European language family originating from the Iberian Peninsula of Europe. It is spoken chiefly in Brazil, Portugal, and several countries in Africa, as well as by immigrants in North America, Europe, and South America. With approximately 267 million speakers, it is listed as the fifth-most spoken native language.

Portuguese-speaking people or nations are known as Lusophone (lusófono). As a result of expansion during colonial times, a cultural presence of Portuguese speakers is also found around the world. Portuguese is part of the Ibero-Romance group, which evolved from several dialects of Vulgar Latin in the medieval Kingdom of Galicia and the County of Portugal, and has retained some Celtic phonology.

Roman currency for most of Roman history consisted of gold, silver, bronze, orichalcum (brass), and copper coinage. From its introduction during the Republic, in the third century BC, through Imperial times, Roman currency saw many changes in form, denomination, and composition. A feature was the inflationary debasement and replacement of coins over the centuries. Notable examples of this followed the reforms of Diocletian. This trend continued with Byzantine currency.

Due to the economic power and longevity of the Roman state, Roman currency was widely used throughout western Eurasia and northern Africa from classical times into the Middle Ages. It served as a model for the currencies of the Muslim caliphates and the European states during the Middle Ages and the Modern Era. Roman currency names survive today in many countries via the Carolingian monetary system, such as the dinar (from the denarius coin), the British pound (a translation of the Roman libra, a unit of weight), the peso (also a translation of libra), and the words for the general concept of money in the Iberian Romance languages (e.g. Spanish dinero and Portuguese dinheiro).

Galician (/ɡəˈlɪʃ(i)ən/ gə-LISH-(ee-)ən, UK also /ɡəˈlɪsiən/ gə-LISS-ee-ən), also known as Galego (endonym: galego), is a Western Ibero-Romance language. Around 2.4 million people have at least some degree of competence in the language, mainly in Galicia, an autonomous community located in northwestern Spain, where it has official status along with Spanish. The language is also spoken in some border zones of the neighboring Spanish regions of Asturias and Castile and León, as well as by Galician migrant communities in the rest of Spain; in Latin America, including Argentina and Uruguay; and in Puerto Rico, the United States, Switzerland and elsewhere in Europe.

Modern Galician is classified as part of the West Iberian language group, a family of Romance languages. Galician evolved locally from Vulgar Latin and developed from what modern scholars have called Galician-Portuguese. The earliest document written integrally in the local Galician variety dates back to 1230, although the subjacent Romance permeates most written Latin local charters after the High Middle Ages, being especially noteworthy in personal and place names recorded in those documents, as well as in terms originated in languages other than Latin. The earliest reference to Galician-Portuguese as an international language of culture dates to 1290, in the Regles de Trobar by Catalan author Jofre de Foixà, where it is simply called Galician (gallego).

Para-Romani are various mixed languages of non-Indo-Aryan linguistic classification containing considerable admixture from the Romani language. They are spoken as the traditional vernacular of Romani communities, either in place of, or alongside, varieties of the Romani language. Some Para-Romani languages have no structural features of Romani at all, taking only the vocabulary from Romani.

Reflecting the northern Indian subcontinent origin (in regions that are today part of India and Pakistan) of the Romani people, who for the last millennium have resided in dispersed locations predominantly throughout Europe, the linguistic makeup of most Para-Romani languages is based on Indo-European languages, except for Laiuse Romani (which is based on Estonian) and Erromintxela (which is based on Basque of the Basque region of Spain and France, separate from the Caló Iberian Romani language of Spain and Portugal based on the Romance languages of Iberia).

West Iberian is a branch of the Ibero-Romance languages that includes the Castilian languages (Spanish, Judaeo-Spanish), Astur-Leonese (Asturian, Leonese, Mirandese, Extremaduran (sometimes), Cantabrian), Navarro-Aragonese and the descendants of Galician-Portuguese.

Until a few centuries ago, they formed a dialect continuum covering the western, central and southern parts of the Iberian Peninsula—excepting the Basque and Catalan-speaking territories. This is still the situation in a few regions, particularly in the northern part of the peninsula, but due to the differing sociopolitical histories of these languages (independence of Portugal since the early 12th century, unification of Spain in the late 15th century under the Catholic Monarchs, who privileged Castilian Spanish over the other Iberian languages), Spanish and Portuguese have tended to overtake and to a large extent absorb their sister languages while they kept diverging from each other.

Andalusi Romance, also called Mozarabic, refers to the varieties of Ibero-Romance that were spoken in Al-Andalus, the parts of the medieval Iberian Peninsula under Islamic control. Romance, or vernacular Late Latin, was the common tongue for the great majority of the Iberian population at the time of the Umayyad conquest in the early eighth century, but over the following centuries, it was gradually superseded by Andalusi Arabic as the main spoken language in the Muslim-controlled south. At the same time, as the northern Christian kingdoms pushed south into Al-Andalus, their respective Romance varieties (especially Castilian) gained ground at the expense of Andalusi Romance as well as Arabic. The final extinction of the former may be estimated to 1300 AD.

The medieval Ibero-Romance varieties were broadly similar (with Castilian standing out as an outlier). Andalusi Romance was distinguished from the others not by its linguistic features primarily, but rather by virtue of being written in the Arabic script. What is known or hypothesized about the particular linguistic features of Andalusi Romance is based on relatively sparse evidence, of which the kharjas, or closing lines of an Andalusi muwaššaḥ poem, are the most important.