Are Italian and Spanish people somehow related?

Question

In my spanish class, after reading off my last name, my teacher said "Are you Italian?", and I said yeah. Then she said "Good, then it's in your blood". She was talking about the language. How would that be in my blood?

Answer 1

lol yeah... i dont know about that. sicilian and italian maybe...spanish i dont know.

hot guys though : )

Answer 2

Italy and Spain aren't too far away from each other

Answer 3

Italian and Spanish are very close, an Italian speaker can pretty much understand Spanish and vice versa probably even more than Portuguese. At one time in history, Sicily and Naples were part of Hispania and many Catalan people are of Sicilian decent and most likely vice versa. Even language wise the two have influenced each other, also I have met Italians with the same maiden surname as mine (Rivera) and many others that are both Spanish and Italian.

Answer 4

Yes both languages have the same root Romance Language  

Answer 5

Yeah i guess.

Well, Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese are all from Latin. So i guess you would be..  

Answer 6

not that much...italian people are more related with east european countries like Poland, Hungary, slovenia and greece ones maybe. In common with spain they got only the language which is quite similar

Answer 7

The ancestors of Spaniards were called Iberians, and lived in what it is now Spain. Between the 1st and the 2nd Punic wars (241 to 201 BC) the Romans conquered Iberia, renaming it as "Hispania", and Latin became the official language of the land. The natives of Hispania became integrated in the Roman population and some of them rose to preminence in Roman society and politics, such as Emperor Trajan and Hadrian, both of which came from Hispanian families.

Between 1073 and 1479 the Kingdom of Aragona grew to the point of conquering large swaths of territory of the adjoining states, including the islands of Sardinia and Sicily and the south of the Italian peninsula up to Naples.

For the following two centuries the Spanish crown, now in the hands of the Hapsburg family, came to rule over even larger parts of the world, its possessions stretching as faraway as Mexico, the Philippines and the Netherlands. Among its ruled territories was most of actual Italy, from Milan to Sicily, in which Spanish was the official language until the 1600s.

That's why many Italians (particularly from the South and the isles) have Spanish heritage, and many Spaniards have Italian roots as well. Italian and Spanish languages both evolved from Latin, and maintain to this day a grammatical and fonetical closeness shared with Portuguese and Romanian as well. That's why if you know Italian you can learn to speak Spanish faster.

Answer 8

theres no "italian langueag" i guess, so they must speak spanish over there?!

Answer 9

Italian and Spanish are pretty similar so I guess she meant since you are italian its in your blood (romance languages)

Answer 10

the two languages are very similar so if you know any Italian then it will help you in Spanish

Answer 11

Italian and Spanish (and French) are romance lanuages derived from Latin.  Many words overlap and others are simply pronounced differently.  My grandfather (Italian) could understand Spanish without ever having learned spanish.

Answer 12

Both speak a Romance language, Both Spanish and Italians are Mediterraneans, and both countries were part of the Roman Empire. So, I guess you could say it's your blood.