10 EXTRAORDINARY FACTS ABOUT THE SPANISH LANGUAGE 1・Mexico is the largest Spanish-speaking country with over 121 million people. 2・Around 8% of Spanish vocabulary has its origins in the Arabian Peninsula. E.g. Almohada that means pillow. 3・There are 19 tenses in Spanish and 6 ways to speak using past tenses (including periphrasis) 4・Spanish is the 2nd largest native language in the world. 5・Spanish is a phonetic language, which means that words are written as they are pronounced. 6・Spanish pronunciation contains only 5 vowel sounds (same as Japanese) whereas English has 20. 7・Spanish is the official language of 22 countries in 4 continents. 8・Nouns that end in -a are usually feminine (la) and those ending in -o are usually masculine (el). Although there are some exceptions, such as: el mapa (map), la mano (hand), el clima (weather), el problema (problem), el día (day), la radio or la modelo (model). 9・Spanish is the 3rd most used language on the Internet. 10・The letter Ñ [ˈeɲe] is very particular, because the only language in the world that uses it is the Spanish, although the phoneme exists in many other languages. It became part of the Spanish alphabet in the 18th century and has come to represent the identity of the Spanish language as mark for Hispanic heritage.