With the inception of European colonialism during the Renaissance, European languages started to spread around the globe. The prime agents were Portuguese, Spanish, English, and French, with Dutch, German, Russian, Italian, and Danish playing a less important role. As a result of their colonial histories and twentieth-century developments, English and Spanish have become the two most widely spoken post-colonial languages world-wide today. Taken together, recent calculations estimate that they have slightly over 820 million native speakers across the globe (with English contributing around 378 million and Spanish about 442 million). Moreover, the two languages share aspects of their colonial and post-colonial development while, at the same time, showing striking differences in the sociolinguistic and typological developments of their respective offspring varieties. Surprisingly, however, a systematic comparative account of the rise of English and Spanish to their current roles as world languages has not been attempted so far. It is one of the aims of the present volume to fill this gap.

This chapter gives an overview of the contacts Spanish experienced since the beginning of colonization. It first sketches the earliest contacts of Latin on the Iberian Peninsula, before outlining the settings in which new varieties of Spanish emerged as it spread into the world. It presents varieties along a continuum of increasing contact intensity from high-contact and mixed varieties, such as Caribbean Spanish and Paraguayan Jopará, to the few Spanish-lexified creole languages. It also discusses the challenges encountered in the description and classification of Afro-Hispanic varieties as intermediate varieties to show which methodological challenges still need to be addressed and how they contribute to larger theoretical issues, particularly those concerning the synchronic classification of creole languages and the creole prototype. The conclusion gives an outlook towards possible directions the discipline of Spanish contact linguistics could take in the future.