Spanish is part of the Indo-European family of languages, which are spoken by more than a third of the world's population. Other Indo-European languages include English, French, German, the Scandinavian languages, the Slavic languages and many of the languages of India. Spanish can be classified further as a Romance language, a group that includes French, Portuguese, Italian, Catalan and Romanian. Speakers of some of those, such as Portuguese and Italian, can often communicate with Spanish speakers to a limited extent.
Spanish is one of the world's most phonetic languages. If you know how a word is spelled, you can almost always know how it is pronounced
