The world speaks English and Spanish

During the Instituto Cervantes’s recent annual presentation, they gave information about their annual report in which they talked about the state of Spanish in the world. The Instituto Cervantes is responsible for the international diffusion of the language. The annual’s conclusions couldn’t be more positive. We can conclude that Spanish is and will stay the second language of the world.  

In the annual report they talked about the following topics:

• ·   Spanish is the second most spoken mother tongue (almost 500 million people have this language as their mother tongue, after Chinese.)

• ·    It’s the second most studied language, after English, and it’s really ahead in comparison to the following languages such as French and German. At the moment, there are more than 20 million students who are studying Spanish.

• ·   Spanish is the second most used language in international communication (in the commercial, economic and political area), after English.

• ·   It is already the second language in several internet fields: on Twitter it just became the second most used language and on Facebook it already was, with more than 80 million users. In general we can say that Spanish is the third language on the Internet, after English and Chinese, but it’s clearly the Spanish language that can count on a better growth: it increased with a percentage of 800 in the last 10 years, in respect of for example the rise of 300% of the English; in certain large language regions such as Latin America, there was already a growth of 1200% in the last 10 years. In fact, because Latin America presents 90% of the Hispanic speakers and because the introduction of the Internet (the part of the population that has access to the Internet) is much lower over there than the European average according to what people expect of Latin America (40% in Latin America in relation to 75% in Europe), they hope that this international growth keeps being as strong during the following years.

• ·   The Spanish language can count on a huge advantage in respect of it’s two competitors, namely English and Chinese: it has a great stability and equality, which is the result of, on the one hand well organised work and on the other hand the good language academies in the Hispanic countries. This allows each Spanish speaking person to understand and to be understood perfectly.

• ·     They have calculated that by 2030, an estimated 7,5% of the population will speak Spanish. This percentage is more remarkable than the ones of the other languages: 2,2% for Russian, 1,4% for French, 1,2% for German… In 3 or 4 generations 10% of the world population will communicate in Spanish.

• ·    In 2050, the United States will be the country with the largest number of Spanish speaking people in the world. Today Mexico is the largest Spanish speaking country.

After reading this text we can clearly conclude that Spanish is, after English, the most important language in the world. In addition to this fact we can also determine that Spanish is the second language for the English speaking population.