The aim of this History of the Spanish Language is to provide the reader with as complete a picture as possible of the development of Spanish over the last two thousand years. The book is concerned essentially with the internal history of Spanish (with what used to be called, rather forbiddingly, ‘historical grammar’), although the external history of Spanish (the account of the circumstances in which Spanish has been spoken and written over time) is discussed at some length in the Introduction. In writing this book, I had in mind the needs of undergraduate and postgraduate students of Spanish and other Romance languages, but more advanced scholars will, I trust, find it a useful source of reference.

My indebtedness to other scholars will be evident on almost every page, but I have not sought to acknowledge this debt in detail at each moment; such acknowledgement is to be found in the list of references on pp. 332–40. Where I make reference in the text to the work of a particular scholar, it is with the specific aim of directing the reader to a source in which a more complete discussion may be found of the issue in question than is possible within the confines of a textbook.

Help in the writing of this book has come from many sources, from many cohorts of students who have participated over the years in my seminars on the history of Spanish, from colleagues with whom I have discussed many of the issues concerned, and from those who have read drafts of the text.