Xībānyá Yǔ

Xībānyá (Spanish 西班牙) Yǔ (Language; Speech 语 語) ← Tap/click to show/hide the “flashcard”

In addition to all the English-speaking publishers who are helping in the Mandarin field, there are also many whose mother tongue is Spanish. “Spanish” in Spanish is “español”, and in Mandarin, it’s “Xībānyá (Spanish 西班牙) Yǔ (Language; Speech 语 語)”, this week’s MEotW.

es is the ISO 639-1 code and the IETF language tag for Spanish.

The syllables/morphemes that make up “Xībānyá (Spain | Spanish 西班牙)”—“xī (west | western 西)”, “bān (class; team | squad | {work shift} 班)”, and “yá (tooth [→ [ivory]] 牙)”—seem to have no semantic or meaningful connection to Spain or Spanish things, so it is evident that they were chosen because of sounding at least vaguely like “Spain” when spoken together.

As for “yǔ (language; speech | saying; proverb | words; expression | speak; say 语 語)”, as mentioned in the MEotW post on “Yīngyǔ (Yīng·yǔ English · Language; Speech 英语 英語)”, “yǔ (language; speech | saying; proverb | words; expression | speak; say 语 語)” refers specifically to the speech of a language—its linguistically primary aspect—not to any writing that came to be developed based on that speech.

Interesting Statistics

Wikipedia provides the following interesting statistics on Spanish:

Today, it is a global language with nearly 500 million native speakers, mainly in Spain and the Americas. It is the world’s second-most spoken native language, after Mandarin Chinese,^{[source][source]} and the world’s fourth-most spoken language overall after English, Mandarin Chinese, and Hindi.

(Note that one of the sources for the above quote is the Ethnologue website, which seems to be one of the foremost authorities on the world’s languages.)

With so many Spanish-speakers in the world, it’s little wonder that they are so well represented in the worldwide Mandarin field.

Spanish’s Place in Its Language Family Tree

Wikipedia also tells us the following regarding Spanish’s place in its language family tree:

Spanish is a part of the Ibero-Romance group of languages of the Indo-European language family, which evolved from several dialects of Vulgar Latin in Iberia after the collapse of the Western Roman Empire in the 5th century.

This language family tree placement seems to be generally accepted, and is confirmed, for example, by American sinologist and University of Pennsylvania Professor of East Asian Languages and Civilizations Victor H. Mair in his article “What Is a Chinese ‘Dialect/Topolect’? Reflections on Some Key Sino-English Linguistic Terms” (p. 2), which can be found here (PDF) and here (web page) on his website Sino-Platonic Papers.

In comparison, English is also generally considered to be in the Indo-European language family, but in the Germanic group, not in the Ibero-Romance group like Spanish is.