Spanish language

Spanish Castellano, Español
Speakers	~ 420,000,000
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/6/6c/Map-Hispanophone_World.png/300px-Map-Hispanophone_World.png
Countries	Andorra, Argentina, Belize, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Equatorial Guinea, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Morocco, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Philippines, Puerto Rico, Spain, Trinidad & Tobago, Uruguay, USA, Venezuela
Status	official
Unicode	Latin-1 Block
Direction	lrtb
Alphabet	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, the correct name of the language is castelian (castellano). See "Names given to the Spanish language".

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 autonomous 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

Special (punctuation) symbols

¿¡ªº

Formats

Date

Traditionally, dates are in the DD/MM/YY

Numbers

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

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)           more likely 4,600,000
 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