origins.latin.timeline
A timeline: from Latin to today's Spanish
Twenty-two centuries in one thread: Roman Hispania, the Visigothic kingdoms, al-Andalus, the rise of Castilian in the north, Alfonso X, Nebrija in 1492, the sibilant readjustment, the Academies, and a language whose centre of gravity is now American.
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Explanation
218 BC: Rome lands in Hispania; within two centuries Latin has replaced the local languages except Basque. 409–711: Suebi, Vandals and Visigoths rule the peninsula from Toledo, speaking Latin themselves within a few generations. 711: the Muslim conquest makes most of the peninsula al-Andalus, where Arabic becomes the language of culture while a Romance vernacular (Mozarabic) keeps being spoken alongside it. Around the 9th and 10th centuries, Castilian appears as the speech of a small northern county around Burgos — a border dialect, in contact with Basque, that nobody expected to matter.
The written record starts there: the Glosas Emilianenses of San Millán de la Cogolla and the Valpuesta cartularies preserve the oldest Romance forms in the region, though exactly which text deserves the title of 'first Spanish' is still argued over. Around 1200 comes the Cantar de mio Cid. In the 13th century Alfonso X el Sabio turns Castilian into a language of law, history, astronomy and translation, and fixes a reasonably consistent spelling. In 1492 Antonio de Nebrija publishes the first grammar of any modern European vernacular — the same year Granada falls and Castile reaches America.
The 16th and 17th centuries bring the reajuste de las sibilantes, the reorganization of the sibilants that produced both the peninsular distinción of s and z and the seseo of Andalusia and the Americas, while the aspirated h inherited from Latin F- went silent. The Real Academia Española was founded in 1713, spelling was reformed through the 19th century, and in 1951 the Association of Academies made the standard a shared, pan-Hispanic project. Today Spanish has around 500 million native speakers, the great majority of them American — so the norm is now negotiated among 23 academies rather than dictated from Madrid.
Examples
With the help of our lord Christ…
From his eyes, weeping so bitterly…
Language was always the companion of empire.