Spanish exceeds 600 million speakers worldwide for the first time

Eduardo González Potential Spanish speakers have exceeded the 600 million mark worldwide in 2024 for the first time, thanks in large part to its growing use in music, film and video games. This is what emerges from the Yearbook ‘Spanish in the World 2024’, prepared by the Instituto Cervantes 2024 and presented this Wednesday at the headquarters of this institution of Spanish cultural diplomacy in Madrid. The document, which analyses the situation of the Spanish language and Spanish culture in the world with the latest data and figures, was presented by Luis García Montero, director of the Institute, and Carmen Pastor, Academic Director of the institution. The Minister of Culture, Ernest Urtasun, cancelled his participation in this event due to the entry of the DANA in eastern Spain. These data are a “reason for pride, but they should not mean falling into complacency”, and reveal the good health of Spanish “in a difficult situation for the world”, declared Luis García Montero. “We have many challenges ahead and we want to continue moving forward, but we can be happy with the cultural strength of Spanish in the world, which has become a benchmark of democratic value against the reactionary and violent thinking that is emerging,” continued the director of Cervantes, who also highlighted the importance of the economic value of the language and recalled that the contribution of all Spanish-speaking countries to the world GDP is over six percent. The 652-page study, which is in its twenty-fifth edition, includes several articles that analyse specific situations in several Spanish-speaking countries (Spain, Mexico, Cuba, Peru, Argentina, Colombia, Chile and Equatorial Guinea) and that address the presence of the language in series, international music and video games. According to the Yearbook, potential Spanish speakers will exceed the figure of 600 million worldwide for the first time in 2024, a figure that had been close to that for several years. This figure includes almost 500 million native speakers, in addition to those with limited proficiency (around 78 million) and students (more than 24 million, a group with ample room for growth). The report highlights that Spanish remains the second mother tongue on the planet, after Mandarin Chinese and above English, Hindi and Arabic. In Spanish-speaking countries, according to the study, the proportion of native speakers is 93.63% of the population (with the exceptions of Paraguay, Guatemala, Bolivia and Equatorial Guinea, which have a proportion of native Spanish speakers of less than 85%). In general, the percentage of the indigenous or native population capable of communicating in Spanish is 92.25% and the percentage of the monolingual population in a language other than Spanish is 7.75%. On the other hand, the number of native Spanish speakers outside of Hispanic countries is over 45 million, while the number of speakers with limited proficiency in Spanish-speaking countries is around 25 million and, in non-Hispanic countries, over 50 million. Likewise, the number of Spanish speakers outside of Hispanic countries is close to 100 million, mainly due to their migratory background. A particularly interesting detail at this time is that Hispanics in the United States eligible to vote in the 2024 presidential elections are over 36 million, which represents 14.7% of the total American electorate. The percentage of Hispanic voters in the United States has doubled in the last two decades, rising from 7.4% in 2000 to the aforementioned 14.7% in 2024. Regarding language learning, the Yearbook indicates that in 2024 there will be more than 24 million Spanish learners in the world, especially concentrated in the United States, the European Union and Brazil, given the relative weight of this language in formal education systems. Over the last ten years, the number of Spanish learners has been growing at an average rate of two percent, driven by its dynamism in countries of the European Union and Western and Central Africa. In addition, international university education offers a prominent space to the Spanish language, in competition with French. The Yearbook also shows that the number of countries in which Spanish is official, spoken or majority is still lower than that of English, French or Arabic speaking countries and that the “index of spoken language” of Spanish as a second language is the lowest of the official languages of the UN. However, the index of the speaking population places Spanish as the second language, after Mandarin Chinese, among the official languages of the United Nations and shows that the coefficient of speakers of Spanish as a first language is among the highest. Another notable detail of the report is that the Spanish-speaking community shows a level of human development higher than the average of the English-speaking and French-speaking communities. Cinema, music, video games, Internet On the other hand, the study shows that the proportion of relevant websites whose content is expressed in Spanish is above the percentages of sites with content in German or French and that the language is consolidating itself in the world as one of the main options for users of platforms such as Netflix or Spotify, as well as for consumers of video games. The Yearbook's chapter dedicated to Spanish in film and music shows that Spain is the fifth producer of series among the hundred most viewed on Netflix in the world and is, together with the United Kingdom, the largest producer of fiction series in Europe. In addition, in 2023, nearly a quarter of the songs in the hit lists of portals such as YouTube or Spotify used Spanish. In that same year, the consumption of music in English fell by 3.8%, exactly the same percentage by which the consumption of music in Spanish increased.

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