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In practice, none. “The vocabulary is the same, the spelling of words and grammar rules are the same. The difference is that the terms appeared at different times”, says linguist Neide Maia González, from the University of São Paulo (USP). The Castilian word is older. It dates back to the kingdom of Castile, in the Middle Ages, when Spain did not yet exist. When the country began to consolidate itself, in the 13th century, the kingdom of Castile prevailed over the other territories in the region that today make up Spain. Because of this leadership, Castilian, a dialect with a strong influence of Latin, ended up being adopted as the official language of the new country in 1492, with the unification of the kingdoms that correspond to today’s Spain.
The reason why some countries choose to call the language Castilian and others Spanish is just political: you will hardly hear an Argentinian saying he speaks Spanish, since the name refers to the colonial period. “For this reason, the term Castilian is more used in South America. Spanish is common in the Caribbean, Mexico and in areas bordering another major language, English. In Spain, the use of terms depends on the region: in the north, people refer to the language as Castilian. In Andalusia and the Canary Islands, the language is called Spanish,” says another linguist, Francisco Moreno Fernández, director of the Instituto Cervantes, in the United States.
Read too:
– How many languages are there in the world?
– Why did the lands of Spain in America become so many countries?
– How many languages came from Latin?