What do you mean with "castellano" vs "español"? I'm a native speaker and over here we call the language in general "castellano". For me the two words are synonymous (i.e. both refer to the general language, not to some specific dialect).
Ultimately the fun part of talking about languages is that no matter how much one person might believe that their terms are clear and unambiguous, if the community of speakers is large enough, you are bound to find competing meanings either way.
In other words, “Español”could be thought of as a group of Spanish languages with “Castellano” being a distinct language within that group.
They all come from Vulgar Latin and depending on how you split it but Portuguese and Gallego come from a common ancestor and one has an easier time understanding Gallego if one speaks Portuguese than if one speaks only Spanish and Catalan would be a post until itself once we start discussing Occitan and Valencian, but it’s also not descended from Spanish (Gallo-Romance)
TLDR I really wish people would stop according Castellano as an official language and a bunch of languages that are as older or older than Castellano as some dialect descending from Castellano.
Castellano is the official language of the Spanish government from eg https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Spanish_Academy and of course decades of repression of regional languages under eg the Franco regime. I don’t mean official as in “the true language” I mean official as in “the Spanish government/regime/royal dialect for centuries”. To the point many people as you mention equate Castellano with “Spanish” which is just not true - I agree with you
Maybe I am misunderstanding your comment but it's not me that is making Castillian "official" - I think it's bullshit that other Spanish languages aren't treated with more respect it's - the historical reality that it was accorded official status due to the political dominance of Castile and consequently the use of Castillian as a common tongue
I speak Spanish but I'm not Castilian and has no relationship with those two regions (Castile-Leon and Castile-La Mancha).
Are you sure?
> There are multiple dialects/languages (eg Gallego, Catalan) spoken in Spain that aren’t really common in the new world, the new world dialects are mostly based on the Castilian (castellano) dialect which was and is the prestige/official Spanish dialect promoted by the government and which settlers likely had in common.
Let’s see if e.g. Catalan is really relevant here.
It clearly is not. Why? The original commenter brought up the supposed differences between “castellano” and “español” in the context of Cuban Spanish. The minority languages of Spain are completely irrelvant here.
There are places in Latin America where they call their Spanish “castellano” (in Spanish). While other places call it “español”. And in that context they do just mean “Spanish”, since they have no reason to care about the minority languages of Spain.
So my shot in the dark guess was that the original commenter meant to refer to the difference between Spanish spoken in Spain and Spanish spoken in Latin America.
The Spanish Royal Academy makes it clear: https://www.rae.es/dpd/espa%C3%B1ol
Some Latin Americans will call their language Castellano. Then my guess—since one can only guess what the hell people mean—was that this has something to do with the difference between Spanish from Spain and Spanish from whatever Latin American country. (But who knows?)
Furthermore, you’ll see that the original context was Cuban Spanish versus whatever “Spanish” without any adjective means. Do you really think that your little pet peeve about the intra-politics of Spanish languages are relevant in this context? People weren’t talking about the differences between Catalan and Spanish!
> The Spanish Royal Academy makes it clear: https://www.rae.es/dpd/espa%C3%B1ol
Since you’re so sensitive to minority languages and whatnot, maybe you’ll understand that “settlers” might have their own words that might deviate from an Academy based in Spain.
It's dictionary has nearly every Spanish term registered, no matter which side of the Atlantic you choose.
RAE doesn't dictate which dialect of the Spanish it's the "correct" one. Every Spanish language subdialect it's the correct one.
For instance, the spelling of z/c before a-o-u/e-i as either /s/ or /th/ depends on the dialect you choose. https://dle.rae.es/c
To counter-point your claims, there are a myriad of dialects of Spanish inside Spain. Some of them even are similar to the ones used in Hispanic-America.
I'm not talking about the other languages of Spain: Aragonese, Asturian, Basque, Catalan, Galician, Valencian, Extremaduran, etc. I'm only talking about the language that is official in all Spain, Spanish (and its dialects).