Spanish grammar

Spanish grammar is the grammar of the Spanish language (español, castellano), which is a Romance language that originated in north central Spain and is spoken today throughout Spain, some twenty countries in the Americas, and Equatorial Guinea.Spanish is an inflected language. The verbs are potentially marked for tense, aspect, mood, person, and number (resulting in some fifty conjugated forms per verb). The nouns form a two-gender system and are marked for number. Pronouns can be inflected for person, number, gender (including a residual neuter), and case, although the Spanish pronominal system represents a simplification of the ancestral Latin system.Spanish was the first of the European vernaculars to have a grammar treatise, Gramática de la lengua castellana, written in 1492 by the Andalusian linguist Antonio de Nebrija and presented to Isabella of Castile at Salamanca.The Real Academia Española (RAE) traditionally dictates the normative rules of the Spanish language, as well as its orthography.Formal differences between Peninsular and American Spanish are remarkably few, and someone who has learned the dialect of one area will have no difficulties using reasonably formal speech in the other; however, pronunciation does vary, as well as grammar and vocabulary.Recently published comprehensive Spanish reference grammars in English include DeBruyne (1996), Butt & Benjamin (2004), and Batchelor & San José (2010).