DO YOU KNOW WHICH IS THE MOST SPANISH LETTER OF ALL?

If you are thinking about learning Spanish, there is surely a letter of the alphabet that has caught your attention. We are referring to the Ñ, that ene with a small wavy line above it that is articulated by hitting the middle part of the tongue on the palate.

Thanks to the ñ we can pronounce words like uña, pestaña, enseñanza, señor and, of course, España. But... what is the origin of this clearly Spanish lyric? Its birth occurred in monastic circles, where copyists began to use the spelling as an abbreviation in words that included two en's. In this way they saved effort and paper.

Over time, the expansion of the Romance languages and the emergence of universities, the ñ also replaced combinations such as MN, GN, NG and NI and in the 12th century, the monarch Alfonso these sounds, appearing in the first Spanish grammar of 1492.

And although it is a Spanish letter, it is not only used in Spanish. It is also present in Galician, Asturian, Basque and in languages of countries linked to the discovery of America, such as Mapuche, Guaraní, Mixtec, Zapotec, Otomi, Quechua or Aymara. We can even find it in Papamiento, Tagalog, Chabacano, Bubi, Chamorro, Tatar, Wolof, Breton and in some aboriginal languages of Australia.