The position of Spanish in the world in 2015

The position of Spanish in the world in 2015 Ghent (Belgium) Lieve Vangehuchten & Felipe Santos Rodríguez - Almost 470 million people speak Spanish as a native language. That is 6.7% of the world's population, and their share of the total world population is increasing while the share of native English and Mandarin speakers is decreasing. Spanish is the second most spoken native language in the world after Mandarin.



Spanish holds the second place as a working language for international business and politics right after English. The use of Spanish in the internet has increased over 1100% between 2000 and 2013. Spanish is now the second most important language in Wikipedia and on the two biggest social media platforms Facebook and Twitter.

In the United States, more than 41 million American citizens speak Spanish as a native language, due to strong growth of the Hispanic community between 2000 and 2010. The Hispanic community is the largest ethnic minority in the United States. As a result, Spanish is currently the most widely spoken second language in the US, a position that will only continue to increase in the future. Demographers predict that by 2050, the US will have the largest number of native speakers of Spanish in the world.

Worldwide, more than 21 million people are currently learning Spanish as a foreign language, and there are 1.5 million more learners than in 2014. The US, Brazil and France are the countries with the biggest growth in Spanish learners, but Poland, Italy, Ireland and Germany have also seen exponential increases. In the US, Spanish is the most widely-studied foreign language.

In Africa, Spanish has also seen some growth: In Benin, 412,000 people are currently studying Spanish as a second language. 205,000 in Ivory Coast, 341,000 in Senegal, 167,000 in Gabon and 198,000 in Equatorial Guinea.

In Belgium, there are currently 46,000 people learning Spanish: 13,000 of them in school, 7,500 in University classes and 25,000 adults learning one way or another.

These figures as well as other relevant information can be read about in more detail in El español: una lengua viva, an annual report published by the Instituto Cervantes, the Spanish organisation that promotes the use of Spanish internationally. Since 2012, the Instituto Cervantes has tracked the status of Spanish in the world.

The 2015 report is free to download as a pdf, but is currently only available in Spanish.



More information is available through Felipe Santos Rodríguez, Director of the Instituto ((dirbru@cervantes.es))

Cervantes, Brussels More information is also available through Lieve Vangehuchten, professor of Spanish for academic and professional uses at the University of Antwerp(lieve.vangehuchten@uantwerpen.be)



Download the report in pdf:
https://cvc.cervantes.es/lengua/espanol_lengua_viva/pdf/espanol_lengua_viva_2015.pdf

More information: www.cervantes.es

 


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Author: Lieve Vangehuchten & Felipe Santos Rodríguez

Machine translation: SDL Machine Translation (previously SDL BeGlobal)

Post-editing: Giorgio Vassallo

Source language: Nederlands (nl)


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