In the Americas, Spanish is now spoken by people of a great variety of cultural backgrounds, including those of Amerindian and African heritage.
Many Castilians who took part in the Reconquista and later repopulation campaigns of Muslim Iberia were of Basque lineage and this is evidenced by many place names throughout Spain.
The change to [h] took place to a greater degree in the Gascon language in Gascony, in southwestern France, an area that is close to the Basque Country too.
This lexical influence reached its greatest level during the Christian Reconquista, when the emerging Kingdom of Castile conquered large territories from Moorish rulers in the 11th, 12th and 13th centuries.
Due to the long-lasting presence and influence of Arabic, mainly in southern Iberia, Spanish has a significant lexical component from that language, constituting some 8% of its vocabulary according to some estimates.
[10] As to how many words in Modern Spanish are of Arabic origin, the estimates vary widely, depending largely on whether the count includes derived forms and place names.
The suffíx -í (deriving adjectives from place names, as in Marbellí, Ceutí or Iraní, "from Marbella", "from Ceuta", or "from Iran" respectively) is an example.
In October 1492 Christopher Columbus made his first landfall in the Americas, and thereafter Spanish settlers began to come into contact with a host of native American languages.
Those words referring to local features or animals might be limited to regional usage, but many others like cóndor, canoa or chocolate are extended even to other languages.
In many cases, technical expressions that superficially employ common Spanish words are in fact calques from English equivalents.
African – Americas – Arabic – Austronesian – Basque – Celtic – Chinese – Etruscan – French – Germanic – Iberian – Indo-Aryan – Iranian – Italic – Semitic – Turkic – uncertain – various origins.