The Diplomat
The Minister of Foreign Affairs, José Manuel Albares, met yesterday with the director of the Royal Spanish Academy of Language (RAE), Santiago Muñoz Machado, to discuss the “growing presence of Spanish in the world.”
“The RAE is a key institution for the defense and projection of our language, the second in the world by number of native speakers,” the minister declared through his Twitter account after holding a working breakfast with the director of the Royal Spanish Academy at the ministerial headquarters of the Palacio de Viana, in Madrid.
During the meeting, Albares and Machado discussed “the growing presence of Spanish in the world,” said the head of Spanish diplomacy. Spanish is the world’s second mother tongue by number of speakers (493 million speakers), after Mandarin Chinese, and the third language in terms of overall number of speakers (native speakers, limited proficiency and students), after English and Mandarin Chinese, with almost 600 million people, according to the yearbook Spanish in the World 2021, presented in mid-October at the Instituto Cervantes’ headquarters in Madrid.
