Castilian

The Castilians are the people of the high northern Meseta around Burgos, whose Romance vernacular grew from Vulgar Latin brought to the peninsula after 210 BC; its first written traces appear in ninth-century Latin glosses. Their land began as a county of the kingdom of León and became a kingdom itself in the 1000s, and after Ferdinand III united Castile and León in 1230 his crown carried the Reconquista down the Guadalquivir to Seville.

Toledo, taken from the Muslims in 1085, became the forge of the written standard: in the 1200s the royal chancery turned the Burgos dialect into the language of law and learning, enriched by thousands of Arabic words.

The marriage of Isabella and Ferdinand in 1469 joined Castile to Aragon, and the fall of Granada in 1492, the same year Columbus sailed under the Castilian flag, opened an American empire that carried Castilian across the Atlantic. The Nueva Planta decrees of 1716 made Castilian the official Spanish of a centralized monarchy.