Language code: es

Technical information about ISO 639 language code es

The table below provides technical details for the Spanish language, designated by the es code from the ISO 639-1 standard.

Code

es

Name

Official

Spanish

Native

Español

Family
Romance
Text direction

Left-to-Right

Plural rules

More info

Language varieties
Castilian SpanishAndalusian SpanishCanarian SpanishCaribbean SpanishMexican SpanishCentral American SpanishAndean SpanishRioplatense SpanishChilean Spanish
Related languages
PortugueseGalicianCatalanAstur-LeoneseLadino (Judeo-Spanish)
Key facts
Originated from a Latin dialect in medieval Castile and expanded widely after the 13th centuryDistinguishes two verbs for “to be” (ser vs. estar) to convey essence versus stateUses inverted question and exclamation marks (¿, ¡) at the start of interrogative and exclamatory clausesOrthographic standards have been set by the Real Academia Española since 1713Contains hundreds of Arabic loanwords, e.g., almohada (pillow) and azúcar (sugar).
Sample phrase

Hola, ¿cómo estás?

Character encodings

ISO 8859-1, ISO 8859-15, Windows 1252, UTF-8, UTF-16, UTF-32

Supported in Localizely

Spanish belongs to the Indo-European language family, more precisely to the Romance subgroup. It is officially used in more than 20 countries, dependent territories, and among significant minorities. It is also widely used by international organizations such as the European Union. It is written using Latin script (Spanish alphabet). It is estimated that there are more than 500 million speakers worldwide.

Language presence globally

Speakers

124M

*The graph shows a rough estimate of Spanish speakers in countries where it is an official or minority language.

Related locale codes

es-419 Spanish (Latin America and the Caribbean)

es-AR Spanish (Argentina)

es-BO Spanish (Bolivia)

es-BR Spanish (Brazil)

es-BZ Spanish (Belize)

es-CL Spanish (Chile)

es-CO Spanish (Colombia)

es-CR Spanish (Costa Rica)

es-CU Spanish (Cuba)

es-DO Spanish (Dominican Republic)

es-EC SSpanish (Ecuador)

es-ES Spanish (Spain)

es-GQ Spanish (Equatorial Guinea)

es-GT Spanish (Guatemala)

es-HN Spanish (Honduras)

es-MX Spanish (Mexico)

es-NI Spanish (Nicaragua)

es-PA Spanish (Panama)

es-PE Spanish (Peru)

es-PH Spanish (Philippines)

es-PR Spanish (Puerto Rico)

es-PY Spanish (Paraguay)

es-SV Spanish (El Salvador)

es-US Spanish (United States)

es-UY Spanish (Uruguay)

es-VE Spanish (Venezuela)

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