Spain: Where the Castilian Language Was Born

In other regions, where the different Christian kingdoms were being formed, new varieties began to emerge, such as the Catalan, Galician-Portuguese, Asturian or Aragonese Romance languages.

In the Middle Ages, monasteries became centers of cultural diffusion. The monks would copy and illustrate religious and secular books for moralizing purposes.

The year 1492 was of great importance for the Spanish language, with the surrender of Granada to the Catholic Monarchs, the arrival of Columbus in America, and the publication of Nebrija's Castilian Grammar – it was an Annus Mirabilis.

In the 17th century, there was great diversity in the peninsular dialects, but between Castilian and Andalusian – the two main dialectal groups in Spain – there were few differences except for the seseo – that is, the pronunciation of z as /s/ and c before e or i as /s/ – and the reduction of final consonants.

Andalusian is a form of Spanish whose peculiarity lies mainly in pronunciation. Its most characteristic features are similar to some of the other southern dialects: the loss or aspiration of the final "s" or the open vowels.

There are three general features: a faster and more varied rhythm when intonating as opposed to that of Spanish, an expiratory force when articulating sounds that have a different distribution, and a set of pronunciation features that occur in Andalusia more frequently.

The Spanish language arrived in the Canary Islands in the 15th century, but it wasn't permanently established until the Crown of Castile's conquest of the archipelago in the 16th century.

On the Canary Islands, there is a generalized seseo, an absence of the z phoneme, the aspiration of the /s/ at the end of syllables and the j phoneme, along with the vocalization of the famous /ch/ due to a traditionally relaxed pronunciation.