Spanish: The Second Most Studied Language in the World
More people study Spanish as a foreign language than almost any other tongue - which raises the question of why Spanish speakers in the U.S. are still told to go back where they came from.
The Instituto Cervantes, the Spanish government’s official agency for promoting Spanish language and culture worldwide, reported in 2007 that Spanish had become the second most studied language in the world, after English. Over 14 million people were studying it as a foreign language in formal programs. Millions more were learning informally through apps, media, immersion, and proximity.
This is considered good news in Madrid. In the United States, it generates a peculiar cognitive dissonance.
The Numbers
Spanish has approximately 480 million native speakers, making it the second largest language by native speakers after Mandarin Chinese. In the United States alone, Spanish is spoken by roughly 40 million people as a first language - more than in Spain. The U.S. is already one of the largest Spanish-speaking countries in the world by number of speakers, and demographic projections suggest that number will continue growing.
Internationally, Spanish is an official language of 21 countries. It is one of six official languages of the United Nations. It is the dominant language of most of Latin America, a region of over 650 million people. Learning Spanish is, for an English speaker, the single most useful second language investment in terms of the number of people and countries it unlocks.
None of this is surprising to anyone who has thought about it for more than a moment.
The American Exception
Here is what is surprising: in the country with the third or fourth largest Spanish-speaking population in the world, speaking Spanish in public is regularly treated as suspicious, foreign, or threatening.
School districts have debated whether Spanish should be taught in elementary schools or whether it crowds out English instruction. English-only ballot initiatives have passed in multiple states. Immigrants who speak Spanish at work are sometimes told to use English, regardless of whether English is necessary for the job. A person born in Los Angeles to parents from El Salvador can be told, by a fellow American, to speak English or go back to their country.
The country that produces the most Spanish-language content on cable television - by revenue, by viewership - also produces the most English-only political rhetoric aimed at the Spanish-speaking population that watches that content.
What Spanish Carries
Spanish in the United States is not simply a language. It is a contested cultural territory. For second-generation Latinos, Spanish is often the language of their parents’ kitchen and childhood memory, lost to English dominance in schools, recovered imperfectly in adulthood, and mourned when it disappears from a family.
For first-generation immigrants, Spanish is the language in which they are fully themselves - articulate, funny, nuanced, capable of saying exactly what they mean. English, for many, is the language in which they become simpler, slower versions of themselves. This trade-off is rarely acknowledged in policy debates about bilingualism.
What is also rarely acknowledged: Spanish is not one Spanish. The Spanish of a Dominican New Yorker, a Mexican farmworker in California, a Cuban exile in Miami, and a Chicano professor in Austin are four different linguistic experiences that share grammar and vocabulary but diverge in everything else. When Americans discuss “speaking Spanish,” they are discussing a monolith that does not exist.
Who Studies It and Why
The explosion in Spanish-language study in the United States is, in significant part, driven by non-Latino Americans who understand the professional value of the language. Doctors, lawyers, teachers, real estate agents, social workers - people who work in contexts where Spanish-speaking populations are present - are enrolling in Spanish classes in growing numbers.
Meanwhile, many of their patients, clients, students, and neighbors grew up speaking Spanish at home, stopped speaking it as teenagers, and now find themselves taking Spanish classes alongside English monolinguals who are starting from zero.
The irony is sharp enough to cut something. The language that was treated as a liability in a child’s mouth is now marketable as a professional skill in that same child’s adulthood.
The Lesson
If Spanish is the second most studied language in the world, it is not because of U.S. immigration debates or English-only politics. It is because the world has concluded that Spanish is worth knowing.
That conclusion was reached without waiting for U.S. political permission. It will continue to be valid regardless of what language is declared official in any American state.
For the Latino families in the United States who were told, explicitly or implicitly, that Spanish was something to leave behind: the world disagreed with whoever told them that. It is worth knowing they were wrong.