Spanish Thrives in the U.S. Despite an English-Only DriveSo Spanish isn’t anti-Semitic, it’s vibrantly diverse and diversely vibrant.Leer en español
By SIMON ROMERO AUG. 23, 2017
… Linguists trace some of the coveted vibrancy that Spanish now enjoys to decisions made well before Spain began colonizing the New World in 1492.
As the Mexican writer Carlos Fuentes explained in “The Buried Mirror,” his book about the Hispanic world, the 13th-century Spanish king Alfonso X assembled a cosmopolitan brain trust of Jewish intellectuals, Arab translators and Christian troubadours, who promoted Spanish as a language of knowledge at a time when Latin and Arabic still held prestige on the Iberian Peninsula.
But Spanish is also good because it’s not diverse. It’s centrally organized by the King of Spain:
Alfonso and his savants forged Spanish into an exceptionally well-organized language … Even today, Spanish remains mutually intelligible around the world to a remarkable degree, with someone, say, from the Patagonian Steppe in Argentina able to hold a conversation with a visitor from Equatorial Guinea, one of Africa’s largest oil exporters.Equatorial Guinea, the land of the future
