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Spanish names are the traditional way of identifying, and the official way of registering, a person in Spain. They are composed of a given name (simple or composite [a]) and two surnames (the first surname of each parent). Traditionally, the first surname is the father's first surname, and the second is the mother's first surname.
Spanish (español) or Castilian (castellano) is a Romance language of the Indo-European language family that evolved from the Vulgar Latin spoken on the Iberian Peninsula of Europe. Today, it is a global language with about 500 million native speakers, mainly in the Americas and Spain, and about 600 million when including second language speakers.
Standard Spanish may be seen as a type of roof covering and influencing the various spoken dialects of Spanish. Individual varieties of Spanish can be located in both geographical and social space, with the speech of the most powerful being most similar to the standard roof, while the speech of the least powerful differs the most from the standard.
Spanish is a language with a "T–V distinction" in the second person, meaning that there are different pronouns corresponding to "you" which express different degrees of formality. In most varieties, there are two degrees, namely "formal" and "familiar" (the latter is also called "informal").
The second-person familiar plural is expressed in most of Spain with the pronoun vosotros and its characteristic verb forms (e.g., coméis 'you eat'), while in Latin American Spanish it merges with the formal second-person plural (e.g., ustedes comen). Thus, ustedes is used as both the formal and familiar second-person pronoun in Latin America.
As in Spanish, the Dutch u was originally conjugated as the third person in verbs, although most verbs had identical second- and third-person singular forms, so that this difference was not apparent for the most part. It remains today in the use of u heeft ("you (formal) have", like hij heeft "he has"), compared to jij hebt ("you
This form is used in formal letters, academic papers, military, many media companies and some government documents, particularly in French-language ones. Federal regulations for shelf life dates on perishable goods mandate a year/month/day format, but allow the month to be written in full, in both official languages, or with a set of ...
Even in modern times, the use of vosotros may still be found in oratory, legal documents, or other highly formal or archaic contexts. [11] Spanish studies scholar Daniel Eisenberg has noted that because the "use of archaic Spanish can give an impression of authority and wisdom", Latin American Spanish speakers will sometimes use vosotros to ...