Viva Spanish

Yahoo Inc., the popular Internet navigation service, launched an extensive Net guide specifically for Spanish speakers last week at https://espanol.yahoo.com.

The new guide contains a directory of more than 5,000 Web sites in Spanish, spanning 14 topic categories, said Arthine van Duyne, a senior producer at Yahoo in charge of developing the guide.

A guide catering to the third-most-spoken language in the world might seem a little late in coming. After all, Yahoo had previously introduced 13 other international guides in languages ranging from Swedish to Chinese.

But Van Duyne said Yahoo’s previous international guides were put together with help from overseas partners, and each typically focused on a single country. The Spanish guide, on the other hand, contains content from 20 countries and was put together entirely by Yahoo’s staff in Santa Clara.

“There were some complications, because there are many regional idioms of Spanish,” Van Duyne said. “Castilian is quite different from Latin American.”

Yahoo accommodates these variations, allowing a user in Venezuela to search for information on computers by typing in “computadoras,” while a user in Spain can get the same information by typing in “ordenadores.”

Yahoo officials said the number of Spanish speakers on the Internet is expected to top 37 million by 2000. There were 8.1 million last year.