Thank you Goodreads First Reads for this book!As someone who has been learning Spanish as a third language, and living in NY, and a serious student of flamenco, I can easily sum it up by saying that The Story of Spanish hit the spot! The book is a great way to re-read world history from the point of view of not Spain, per se, but Spanish, a living, changing, evolving, stretching, retracting, exploding language. The story begins all the way with Phoneacians, who gave the peninsula its original name, travels through the Moors and the Inquisition, and moves across the Atlantic, and explodes in a whole new continent. As a native Turkish speaker, I even learned where some of the weird words we have originally came from, though Turkish borrowed them directly from French and Italian, I had never thought that they had borrowed them from the native languages of South America (the Americans!) The book is full of fun trivia that I relentlessly repeat to my friends, who roll their eyes at me. Did you know that the first European language spoken in what is now the USA was Spanish (dates back to 1560s). And, here I was thinking those fierce Native American tribes were always expert horse riders! The book also gives a good account of all the Spanish language academies across the different Spanish-speaking countries, and the development of various dictionaries across time. A perfect book to read before/after "The Story of Ain't" and any Henry Hitchings book.Recommended for those who like to know where words come from, those who like Latin America and Latin American literature, telenovelas, civil wars, and world history.

A unique and fascinating survey of the history and present state of the Spanish language. Unfortunately, the book has a disconcerting number of factual errors and typos. The authors are French Canadians, giving them outside perspective, but also allowing them to make some mistakes that, say, a Mexican, might not.On the good side, the reader is immersed in the history of how Vulgar Latin became the foundation of Spanish. The Castilian variant beat the odds to dominate the Iberian Peninsula. Once considered so low it was only spoken and not even used for business, much less poetry, Castilian would eventually become the language of Cervantes and Vargas-Llosa. We learn how largely forgotten characters like King Alfonso X steered Spanish towards its current, unusual level of grammatical and spelling consistency. Spanish is an easy language due to its comparable lack of linguistic exceptions. I really enjoyed this information.But, be forewarned, this 2013 first edition has an unusually large number of typos and errors. It slowed my reading pace because there were so many 'whoa' moments that required rereading. I trust future editions will fix typos, but some factual errors caught my eye. For example, on pg. 211, the authors write France invaded Mexico, "in 1861, attempting to install Maximilian I of Austria as Emperor. This move failed when French troops were badly defeated in Puebla on May 5, 1862 - the famous Cinco de Mayo." That is wrong; the move did not fail. The French lost the battle on May 5, but won the war, installing Maximilian as Emperor of Mexico. The ill-fated monarch ruled Mexico for three years until he was captured and executed in 1867 by rebelling Mexican patriots. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maximili...Another head scratcher was the pg. 322 statement about undocumented workers in the United States, "a prolific job market that has been profoundly deregulated. The wave of labor deregulations since Ronald Reagan nearly matches the exponential growth of Hispanic immigration." The opposite is true. Since 1981, the US enacted numerous laws and regulations, such as the 1986 immigration reform act's employer sanctions, stepped up I-9 requirements, and e-Verify, aimed at stemming illegal immigration. Myriad other laws, such as 1985's COBRA and the 2010 health reform act, have been a wave of regulation, not deregulation. The book lacks notes or footnotes and the 'deregulated' statement was made completely void of any evidence. On pg. 330, the authors state, "In the United States, Guatemalans and Salvadorans don't get along well with Mexicans." This assertion was just stated, without any evidence. I've heard that some Mexicans look down on Guatemalans; in fact, the Mexican-American satirist Gus Arellano jokes about Guatemalans, deliberately mirroring the language nativist Anglo Americans use against Mexicans. But, do Guatemalans and Mexicans really not get along? Are there fights or discrimination between the two communities? The book has a lot of statements of opinion like that. I suspect the statement was based in anecdotal evidence; for what it's worth, I recently read an online article about the explosion of Guatemalan-Mexican intermarriage in Arizona. http://www.azcentral.com/news/article... A few months ago, I visited a Guatemalan bakery with a Mexican-American friend who wanted to see what Guatemalan pastries were like. The Guatemalan-Americans and Mexican-American spoke of their homelands and got along just fine.I didn't attempt to track every mistake in this 400-page book, but my recollection is some dates changed (e.g. 1816 might become 1817 a few paragraphs later), several statements struck me as too bold given the evidence at hand, and there were a few other inconsistencies like an early statement about people in Mexico really celebrating Cinco de Mayo (largely incorrect as it's no more than a small regional holiday in Puebla); later the authors get it right, but contradict the earlier statement, saying Cinco de Mayo is essentially an American holiday, heavily promoted by Corona beer. A few of their Spanish translations to English appeared wrong to my admittedly intermediate Spanish level eyes. Since I am neither linguist nor historian, the handful of errors I caught make me suspicious an expert will find a lot more.

An excellent overview of the broad sweeps of the rise of an obscure regional dialect on the Iberian peninsula to one of the world's most widely spoken languages. I particularly loved the focus of the book on how Spanish maintained it cohesion throughout the centuries despite its incredible growth and potential for fracturing into distinct tongues (as exemplified by Portuguese).The earlier portions of the the book held my interest most, due to my own interests in medieval Spain and Al Andalus. I was surprised to confront the idea that I had not explored which is how little effect Arabic had on Spanish, given the time and area Islamic rule covered. Indeed, aside from a healthy number of nouns, and perhaps some idiomatic phrases, Spanish reamined remarkably unchanged throughout that period.I was also struck by the manifold efforts to unify and codify Spanish throught the centuries, leading up to the remarkable group of national academies that currently set standards, creating a sense of a panhispanic culture which has produced such amazing literature.The latter portions of the book focused predominantly on Spanish in the United States which, while interesting me far less, was still a useful read. Especially interesting to have pointed out again that what is currently the United States has had Spanish speaking communities since the earliest days of the colonial period. The overview of current institutions setting standards was perhaps overly comprehensive, but still interesting.Overall, a must-read for anyone with an interest in Spain, Latin America, linguistics, or American history.

A few errors here and there, but overall quite a good read. I would have liked a bit more language stuff, but I did enjoy the generally excellent history lessons. The defense of prescriptive European language academies (and their derivatives in the Americas) is rather strained -- any descriptivist (meaning, just about any linguist or US-based reader) will roll their eyes -- but I suppose they do serve a few limited purposes, such as style guides for certain formal writing contexts (we Americans tend to use things like the New York Times usage guidebook), and for coordinating terms for software (like, how to translate "log in"). But for forcing a universal Spanish on the world? Forget it! Much better to rely on wonderful online resource such as WordReference.com, where in two minutes anyone can find out from real people the nuances of any word or phrase as it's used in one place or the other.

It's a good read, though ultimately too ambitious for these authors who admit to being recent learners of the language and its history. It is inevitable that a brief treatment of a subject so large and complex will suffer from giving short shrift to just about everything, of necessity, but this is riddled with several serious historical misinterpretations and, most embarrassingly, feeble translations and consistent misspellings of the language that is their exemplar of simplicity and phoneticism! This is not just poor or rushed editing, since the English doesn't suffer from the same deficiencies. I give you, for example, that Cuba had "South America's" first railroad, that Bartolomé de Las Casas first came to the island of "Hispanionala," that Vasconcelos' celebrated "por mi raza hablará el espíritu" is rendered in English as "the spirit will speak for my kind" (!), and unholy unintentional chimeras such as "Congresos International de la...). I'll spare you the tortured etymologies of Nahuatl and various other "americanisms." For these reasons, the book is best read by folks with sufficient background to glean the grand historical plot line, whilst separating the amateurish chaff. The language and its history are indeed an enthralling and challenging narrative. These French-Canadian authors of a similar treatment of French deserve a sympathetic pass for their earnest attempt and courage for taking on this topic.