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 Spanish is said to belong to the group of Romanic languages
of Indo-European family. Besides Spanish, Romanic group 
includes  Portuguese, French, Italian, Rumanian, Moldavian and
some other minor Romanic languages.
Spanish, as any other human language, has a specific structure
of the speech sound chain. It can be distinguished by its
structure from any other  language. Every language has a unique
structure of distributions of speech sounds in its phonemic
chain. The distribution of Spanish vowels will not be considered
till the second stage of the investigation. Let's point out that
consonants bear the semantic load in the word, not vowels.
Therefore, it is more possible to understand the meaning of the
message by consonants, rather by vowels. However, if we fail to
recognise and distinguish two languages, then we resort to the
structure of occurrence of vowels in the speech sound chain.
While comparing languages, it is necessary to keep to the
principle of commensurability. Having it in mind, it is not
possible to compare languages on the basis of the frequency of
occurrence of separate phonemes, because the sets of phonemes
in languages are usually different. The articulartory features
may serve as the basic features in phono-typological reasoning.
First of all, it is the classification of consonants according to the
work of the active organ of speech or place of articulation (4
features: labial, front, palatal, and velar). Secondly, it is the
classification from the point of view of the manner of
articulation or the type of the obstruction (3 features: sonorant,
occlusive and fricative). Thirdly, it is the classification
according to the work of the vocal cords (1 feature: voiced). In
this way, 8 basic features are obtained: 1) labial; 2) front; 3)
mediolingual or palatal; 4) back or velar; 5) sonorant; 6)
occlusive; 7) fricative; and 8) voiced consonants. One should
take the values of the frequency of occurrence of these 8
features in the speech chain of Spanish and compare them to
those of the other Romanic languages. On the basis of the "chi-
square" test and Euclidean distance, we have developed our own
method of measuring the phono-typological distances between
languages (Tambovtsev, 1994-a; 1994-b; 2003). It takes into account
the frequency of occurrence of the 8 consonantal groups
mentioned above to measure the overwhelming mosaic of the
language sound picture. Having compared Spanish to some
languages, we received the following phono-typological
distances:
            Spanish - Esperanto   6.15
            Spanish - Portuguese  7.91
            Spanish - Latin       7.98
            Spanish - Italian     8.35
            Spanish - Rumanian    9.26
            Spanish - French      13.39
           
 As a conclusion, we can state that speech sound picture of 
Spanish is the most similar to Esperanto. One can explain it by
the fact that Esperanto uses many Latin roots in the same way
Spanish does. It is not a surprise that Spanish is close to the
sound pattern of Portuguese or Latin. Actually, Latin is the
parent language of all Romanic languages, thus Spanish uses
many of its roots. Spanish is rather far away from the language
which is geographically close, i.e. French, which undergone so
many phonetic changes. It is logical that Spanish and French are
distant from each other by the phonostatistical point of view. In
fact, sound pattern of French is more different to that of
Spanish, than Spanish to the rest of the Romanic languages. 
Our data state that the speech sound pattern of Spanish more or
less resembles that of the other Romanic languages. Latin, the
parent language for all the Romanic languages, gave all
Romanic languages but French its sound system. We must point
out, therefore, that it is not a coincidence that Portuguese, Italian
and Romanian are more similar to Spanish than French. It was
no surprise for us that Spanish consonants are distributed more
similar to Portuguese, than Italian or Rumanian, because they
were in the closest contact for many years.