In current times, individuals are increasingly discovering foreign languages in addition to their native language. The degree of proficiency in each person’s speech is determined by the contexts in which this language is used. One of the most common languages that are actively studied by people in English and Spanish. Although English and Spanish have quite a lot in common, they still have apparent differences in phonology, morphology, semantics, syntax, and pragmatics.
Although Spanish and English have almost the same alphabet, there are differences not only in the letters themselves but, more importantly, in their pronunciation. Both languages have both spoken and deaf fricative words. However, the leading contrast is that, unlike English, there are only two spoken alveolar fricative elements in the whole Spanish language (Abutalebi & Green, 2008). The sound of the Spanish letter “ñ” is another difference in sounds between Spanish and English since this sound does not exist in English at all.
As for morphology, English and Spanish are similar in terms of the meanings of some prefixes. English is characterized by a considerable percentage of Latin roots, and Spanish developed from Latin (Oettinga, 2018). The main differences in vocabulary are the principles of word formation themselves. Undoubtedly, in English and Spanish, there are suffixes, prefixes, and other parts of words that are similar due to their Latin origin, but there are also differences dictated by the peculiarities of a particular language.
In the semantics of Spanish and English, phraseological phrases with a color component express the speaker’s disapproving attitude. This is because, in most cases, they have a negative connotation and serve to give emotionality to speech. Castilla-Earls et al. (2019) state that the peculiarity of the phraseology of the English language, unlike Spanish, is the presence of a positive purpose in many phraseological units. The negative connotation in Spanish with a component of color designation prevails in phraseological departments with the appointment of black, white, and red. In English, black, blue, yellow, and red carry negative coloration (Galloway et al., 2020). In both languages, the positive connotation is distinguished by the golden color and pink.
The syntactic differences between English and Spanish are in several aspects. Hammer et al. (2020) claim that the word order in English is strictly established, unlike in Spanish, in which the word order is quite flexible. In addition, in English, the use of pronouns for introducing the subject is mandatory, and in Spanish, they can be omitted. The differences between the two languages also lie in verbs, negation, plural, and other syntax elements (Oettinga, 2018). Even though the word order in English is more specified than Spanish, they are still very comparable. Moreover, the similarity between the two languages lies in the use of capital letters. Places, proper names, the first words in a sentence, and names are highlighted in capital letters in Spanish and English.
In English and Spanish, there are many pragmatic similarities, which consist in the origin of words. Both languages have several words that are rooted in Greek and Latin. In addition, sentence construction is one of the pragmatic similarities between the two languages (Castilla-Earls et al., 2019). The pragmatic differences are in the morphology of words, phraseology, and semantics. Nevertheless, both languages are similar and have their own exciting features.
In conclusion, English and Spanish have several differences and similarities. The primary means are the origin, the order of words in the sentence, as well as some elements of morphology. The main differences are some letters of the Spanish language that are missing in English. In addition, the differences are in some phraseological units, semantic aspects, and some other features of each language.
References
Abutalebi, J., & Green, D. (2008). Control mechanisms in bilingual language production: Neural evidence from language switching studies. Language and Cognitive Processes, 23(4), 557-582. Web.
Castilla-Earls, A., Francis, D., Iglesias, A., & Davidson, K. (2019). The Impact of the Spanish-to-English proficiency shift on the grammaticality of English learners.Journal of Speech, Language and Hearing Research, 62(6), 1739-1754. Web.
Galloway, E., Uccelli, P., Aguilar, G., & Barr, C. (2020). Exploring the cross-linguistic contribution of Spanish and English academic language skills to English text comprehension for middle-grade dual language learners.AERA Open, 6(1), 1-20. Web.
Hammer, C., Burchinal, M., Hong, S., LaForett, D., Páez, M., Buysse, V., Espinosa, L., Castro, D., & López, L. (2020). Change in language and literacy knowledge for Spanish–English dual language learners at school-entry: Analyses from three studies. Early Childhood Research Quarterly, 51(1), 81-92. Web.
Oettinga, J. (2018). Prologue: Toward accurate identification of developmental language disorder within linguistically diverse schools.Language, Speech, and Hearing Services in Schools, 49(1), 213-217. Web.