Home · Resources · The Story of Spanish · Al-Andalus and the First Words
Chapter 2 of 6 · 711 – 1300
Eight hundred years of contact with Arabic, a monk scribbling in the margins, and a king who decided his kingdom would stop writing in Latin.
Leer en españolIn 711 an army from North Africa crossed the strait and, within a decade, controlled most of the peninsula. What followed was not a brief occupation but nearly eight centuries of Arabic-speaking presence — longer than the Roman period, and longer than the time separating us from Columbus.
Small Christian kingdoms survived in the northern mountains. One of them, a frontier county bristling with castles, was called Castilla.
Arabic gave Spanish roughly 4,000 words — by most counts the second largest source in the language after Latin itself. They cluster in exactly the fields where al-Andalus was more advanced: agriculture, engineering, science, trade and administration.
| Field | Words |
|---|---|
| Agriculture & irrigation | acequia, aceituna, algodón, azúcar, naranja, arroz, zanahoria |
| Building | albañil, alcoba, azotea, azulejo, alcantarilla, tabique |
| Science & maths | álgebra, cifra, alcohol, alquimia, cenit, auge |
| Trade & government | aduana, almacén, tarifa, alcalde, alguacil, arancel |
| Everyday | ojalá, almohada, taza, jarra, ajedrez, hasta |
The giveaway is AL-. Arabic al- is simply the definite article, and Spanish absorbed it as part of the word. Almohada is really "the cushion", azúcar is "the sugar". Spanish borrowed the article along with the noun and never gave it back — which is why you can say el almacén and stack two definite articles without noticing.
Ojalá. The most-used Arabic word in Spanish comes from law šā' allāh — "if God wills." Every time a Spanish speaker expresses hope, they are using a fragment of Arabic prayer. And it takes the subjunctive, which is its own small piece of history.
Around the 10th or 11th century, in the monastery of San Millán de la Cogolla, a monk reading a Latin manuscript did what students have always done: he wrote notes in the margins, in the language he actually spoke. Those notes are the Glosas Emilianenses.
For decades they were taught as "the first words written in Spanish," and Dámaso Alonso famously called them el primer vagido de la lengua española — the first cry of the Spanish language.
But this is genuinely disputed. A substantial body of scholarship argues the glosses are not Castilian at all but Navarro-Aragonese, a neighbouring Romance variety — San Millán sits in what was then the Kingdom of Navarre. Many specialists now prefer to call them the earliest surviving Romance glosses of the peninsula rather than the first Spanish. Anyone who tells you the question is settled is simplifying.
The same manuscript also contains two glosses in Basque — the oldest written Basque known — which makes it a remarkable document whatever label you give the Romance.
Around 1200, the Cantar de Mio Cid set down the deeds of a Castilian warlord in verse. It is the first long literary work in Castilian, and strikingly readable eight hundred years later.
Note oios for ojos, vazías for vacías, fuertemientre for fuertemente. The spelling hadn't settled, but the grammar is already recognisably Spanish.
In the 13th century, King Alfonso X of Castile, called el Sabio, made a choice with enormous consequences: his court would produce its histories, law codes and scientific translations in Castilian rather than Latin.
His royal scriptorium, drawing on the translation traditions of Toledo where Christian, Muslim and Jewish scholars worked side by side, rendered Arabic astronomy, law and natural science into Castilian — and in doing so had to invent the vocabulary to do it.
Why this was decisive. Alfonso didn't just write in Castilian — he standardised it. A royal scriptorium producing documents at scale has to settle on consistent spellings and consistent grammar. That is how a regional dialect becomes a language of state, two centuries before anyone wrote a grammar of it.
1.In what year did Arabic-speaking forces arrive on the Iberian Peninsula?
2.Roughly how many words did Arabic give Spanish?
3.The "al-" at the start of almohada and alcohol was originally:
4."Ojalá" comes from an Arabic phrase meaning:
5.The Glosas Emilianenses are notes written where?
6.True or false: scholars all agree the Glosas Emilianenses are the first text in Castilian.
7.What other language appears in the same manuscript as the Glosas?
8.The Cantar de Mio Cid dates from around:
9.In the Cid, "de los sos oios" corresponds to modern Spanish ___.
10.What did Alfonso X decide about the language of his court?
11.Which word entered Spanish from Arabic?
12.Why did Alfonso X's scriptorium help standardise Castilian?
Ángel can walk you through the Arabic layer of everyday Spanish — you use a dozen of these words before breakfast.
