Nowadays there are more than 495 million people who have Spanish as their mother tongue. The origin of this language is vulgar Latin, which propagated in Spainat the end of the IIIrd century after Christ.
The first revelations of the Spanish language were initially linked to some manuscripts from the Xth century, around year 974, when a monk wrote small annotations in several languages: Latin, medieval Basque, Hispanic Romance and a variety from Rioja of Spanish or of Navarro-Aragonese. We call these writings the Glosas Emilianenses because they were composed in the Monastery of San Millán de la Cogolla, which is located at about40 km from Logroño. At first these documents were thought to be the beginning of Castilian, but later studies classified the documents as mostly written in Navarro-Aragonese, not in Castilian.
Origin and history of Spanish language: First manuscripts. Cartularios de Valpuesta.
Later, the Instituto Castellano y Leonés de la Lengua (Castilian and Leonese Language Institute) proposed the documents: “Nodicia de Kesos” and “Cartularios de Valpuesta” as being the oldest registers in Castilian and Leonese language. The cartularies were accepted by the Spanish Royal Academy in 2010 as being the first documents with words written in Castilian that are identifiers of our language, unlike the Glosas Emilianenses.
The Cartularios de Valpuesta are manuscripts dated from the XIIth century, which are copies of older ones, which could be from the IXth century, incorporating fundamentals of a Romance Hispanic dialect with more defined differentiating characteristics. Valpuesta is a locality in theBurgos province, at about45 km. from Vitoria-Gasteiz.
The documents included in the named “Nodicia de Kesos” were written in Romance language, dated between 974 and 980 but they are associated to vulgar Latin at an advanced stage which is classified as a Romance language. The content of these documents is an inventory of cheese that a monk made in the Monastery of the Saints Justo and Pastor, in the old villageof Rozuela, which saw its splendour in the XIth century but doesn’t show any remains of that golden age. This space is occupied by themunicipality ofChozas de Abajo, very close to the city ofLeon.
The denomination that the Spanish Royal Academy gave Spanish with reference to the moment when the first writings of a Castilian in the process of being defined appeared was «a Latin language assaulted by a living language».
Image: Cartularios de Valpuesta. Clergymen in the Middle Ages http://goo.gl/nDczL