Spanish language

basgetsi

Spanish Castellano, Español
Speakers	~ 420,000,000
Countries	Andorra, Argentina, Belize, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Equatorial Guinea, Guatemala, Honduras, México, Morocco, Nicaragua, Panamá, Paraguay, Perú, Philippines, Puerto Rico, Spain, Trinidad & Tobago, Uruguay, USA, Venezuela
Status	official
Unicode	Latin-1 Block
Direction	lrtb
Alphabet	Latin (Spanish variant) ABCDEFGHIJKLMNÑOPQRSTUVWXYZ abcdefghijklmnñopqrstuvwxyz ÁÉÍÓÚÜ áéíóúü ¿¡!?
ISO 639-1:	es
ISO 639-2:	spa
ISO/FDIS 639-3:	spa

Spanish, the language of Spain and most of Latin America, is written in the Latin alphabet with several accented letters, all of which are included in the Latin-1 block of Unicode.

Although the term spanish (español) is frequently used, a more 'correct' name of the language is Castilian (castellano). See "Names given to the Spanish language".

l10n

Character sets

Unicode supported.

Script layout

is left-to-right, top-to-bottom. Fully supported by Pango the layout engine chosen.

Fonts

Most (all?) Latin 1 fonts support Spanish as is. In particular the one chosen by HIG-Text and Fonts (DejaVu LGS Sans).

es-AR keyboard

Keyboard

OLPC Argentina Keyboard fully supports the language, although considerations should be taken regarding countries where more than one language is used. Example:

Guarani

Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, & Paraguay

Mapudungun

Argentina & Chile

Quechua

Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador and Perú.

Input methods

except for 'standard' keyboard and touchpad would suffice for general use, although special considerations would be needed for physical dissabilities.

Speech synthesis

is a very locally-sensitive issue, not only at national levels, but also regional (regardless of any political structure). Widespread existance of regional accents and intonations, together with the use of local terminology (be it from native or co-existing languages, and locally accepted barbarisms) may lead to a series of issues when deploying.

Although there exists a 'neutral spoken spanish' (widely used for dubbing TV & movies), linguistic 'minefields' do exist between regions.

Music and sound samples

is probably more appropriate at a country level, or better yet, provincial/state level in order to avoid predominance of the 'cultural' bias.

Dictionaries, Spelling Checkers, Thesaurus

are very much developed in Spanish, although not necessarily tuned for regional use. Of particular interest to Spanish is a working grammar checker given the level of words that differ only in an accented vowel, or differences in letters with little phonetical differentiation in everyday use: caso, casó, cazo, cazó (aprox: case/marry, married, hunt, hunted)

aspell

Spanish is treated as a single language unit, without regional/national divisions. Code:es Name: Spanish Script: Latin Available: 0.50 Status: Incomplete

mozilla

Makes / has the following subdivisions: Mexico, and Spain

abiword

Divides Spanish into the following national dictionaries: Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Puerto Rico, Spain, Uruguay, and Venezuela.

OpenOffice

presents Spanish as the Spain et al, or Mexico. It does offer hyphenation support.

Character recognition

This article is a stub. You can help the OLPC project by expanding it.

Alphabet

ABCDEFGHIJKLMNÑOPQRSTUVWXYZ
abcdefghijklmnñopqrstuvwxyz

Some years ago, the Real Academia Española determined that the special 'composed' characters such as ch, ll, rr (which except for the double r, were all considered characters—ie: a, b, c, ch, d...) were 'discarded' and standardized into just a simple sequenciation. For further information you can see the wikipedia's article.

Special characters

Accented characters

ÁÉÍÓÚÜ
áéíóúü

Punctuation

¿¡

Formats

Date

Traditionally, dates are in the DD/MM/YY

Numbers

use the -9.999,99 format (period for thousands and coma for decimal, prefix sign).

Population

     24,600 Andorra                         (1986)
 33,000,000 Argentina            official   (1995)
     80,477 Belize                          (1991 census)
  3,483,700 Bolivia              official + (1995)
 13,800,000 Chile                official   (1995)
 34,000,000 Colombia             official   (1995)
  3,300,000 Costa Rica           official   (1995)
 10,000,000 Cuba                 official   (1995)
  6,886,000 Dominican Republic   official   (1995)
  9,500,000 Ecuador              official   (1995)
  5,900,000 El Salvador          official   (1995)
     11,500 Equatorial Guinea    official   (1993 Johnstone)
  4,673,000 Guatemala            official   (1995)
  5,600,000 Honduras             official   (1996)
 86,211,000 Mexico               official   (1995)
     20,000 Morocco                         (1993 Johnstone)
  4,347,000 Nicaragua            official   (1995)
  2,100,000 Panama               official   (1995)
    186,880 Paraguay             official   (2000 WCD)           4,600,000 more likely
 20,000,000 Peru                 official + (1995)
      2,658 Philippines                     (1990 census)
  3,437,120 Puerto Rico          official   (1996)
 44,708,964 Spain                official + (2006)
      4,100 Trinidad and Tobago             (2004)
  3,000,000 Uruguay              official   (1995)
 22,400,000 USA                             (1990 census)
 21,480,000 Venezuela            official   (1995)
================================
343,970,119 TOTAL                                             348,570,119 TOTAL 
Source: Ethnologue
        Note that population data is generally at least 10 years old.