The use and knowledge of Spanish continues to grow throughout the world: it is close to 500 million native speakers (496 million, three more than a year ago) and is close to 600 million (specifically, 595, four more than in 2021) if those with limited competence and students are added. This is reflected in ‘El español en el mundo. Instituto Cervantes Yearbook 2022’, presented today.
As reported in the Yearbook, our language continues to be the second maternal language by number of speakers, after Chinese, and the fourth in the global calculation. Almost 24 million of people study it as a foreign language, with a slight decrease due to the pandemic and the withdrawal of language tourism, but the demand for autonomous learning online is increasing.
The director of Cervantes, Luis García Montero, participated in the presentation of this 23rd edition of the yearbook; the Academic Director, Carmen Pastor Villalba; David Fernández Vítores, professor at the University of Alcalá, and German Rigau i Claramunt, deputy director of the Basque Center for Language Technology (HiTZ).
The book also details the Spanish situation in Switzerland, Kenya, the Balkans, the United Arab Emirates and Madagascar. And it addresses the relationship between language and artificial intelligence (AI): the advantages that it can bring to language teaching and assessment (collaborative learning, intelligent tutoring, automatic assessment, prevention of bullying…), although it also carries risks such as addictions, misinformation, bias, invasion of privacy, or manipulation.
Data of Spanish in the world
In ‘Spanish: a living language. Report 2022’, The first section of the book contains up-to-date data in all areas and contexts: demography, teaching and learning as a foreign language, the Internet and social networks, economic influence, cultural activity, use in international organizations, scientific dissemination, etc. The report, prepared by the researcher David Fernández Vítores, has been coordinated by the Academic Department of the Cervantes Institute. These are the basic data:
-More than 496 million people have Spanish as their mother tongue (three million more than in 2021), 6.3% of the world population.
-Potential users (native Spanish speakers plus limited proficiency users and foreign language learners) exceed 595 million (four million more than last year), which represents 7.5% of the world population.
-Spanish is the second mother tongue in the world by number of speakers, after Mandarin Chinese.
-It’s the fourth language in the global count of speakers (native domain + limited proficiency + students), after English, Mandarin Chinese and Hindi.
-The number of Spanish-speakers will continue to grow in the next five decades, although their relative weight will progressively decrease between now and the end of the century.
-In 2060, USA It will be the second Spanish-speaking country in the world, after Mexico. 27.5% of Americans will be of Hispanic origin.
-Almost 24 million people (specifically, 23,748,298) study Spanish as a foreign language. The Covid-19 has caused a slight decrease in students, with the language tourism sector especially hit, but the number of apprentices on web pages dedicated to autonomous learning is picking up.
The United States remains the country with the largest number of students of Spanish, which triples that of students of the rest of the languages combined.