According to experts, there are more than 6,000 languages in the world, spread over the five continents. Languages which, as well as allowing people to communicate with each other, reflect the way of viewing the world and the idiosyncrasies of their speakers. And the Spanish language, in this huge list, holds an increasingly more important position, strengthening the powerful ties between Spanish speakers in Latin America, Spain and the rest of the world, including all those who are passionate about Hispanic culture.

Specifically, there are 585 million people in the world who speak Spanish, 5 million more than last year. Of these, almost 489 million – 6 million more than in 2019 – are native Spanish-speakers. These figures are contained in the Spanish around the world 2020 yearbook, presented on 15 October by the Cervantes Institute, which show the constant rise of the Spanish language in the world. Accordingly, Spanish has consolidated its position as the second mother tongue by number of speakers after Mandarin Chinese, and the third language in the global calculation of users after English and Mandarin Chinese. In summary, at present, 7.5% of the planet’s inhabitants speak Spanish and 6.3% are native Spanish-speakers, above the 5.2% of English speakers and the 1% of French speakers.

Aside from the 21 countries that have Spanish as their official language, it is very widely spoken in the United States, where more than 41 million native Spanish speakers live, in addition to another almost 15 million people with skills in Spanish. For its part, there are almost 31 million people in the European Union with some knowledge of the Spanish language.

The Cervantes Institute Yearbook also sets out the growth of Spanish over the last decade: 30% more people now speak it, and 60% more foreigners study it around the world. For the first time, the figure of 22 million students of Spanish in 110 countries has been attained, a figure that does not take into account, for example, Spanish teaching at private centres, and hence this figure may be even higher. The United States, with more than 8 million students of Spanish, stands at the head of non-Spanish-speaking countries with the most students of the language, followed by Brazil, with 6.1 million, and France, with 2.7 million students. Throughout the European Union (including the United Kingdom), more than 5.2 million students study Spanish.

Although at a scientific level the Spanish languages does not have the same international projection as in literature, music and cinema, given that science has adopted English as its vehicular language, Spanish is ranked as the second language in which the highest number of scientific texts is published, ahead of French, German, Chinese, Portuguese and Russian. 4.5% of global scientific production has its origin in a Spanish-speaking country. 60% of scientific documents in Spanish are produced in Spain alone.

Those countries where Spanish is the official language generate almost 7% of global GDP. When including all Spanish speakers, moreover, this would concentrate a joint purchasing power of around 9% of global GDP. If the Spanish-speaking community in the United States constituted an independent country, its economy would be the eighth largest in the world.

Furthermore, Spanish is the second most important language spoken in the tourism sector: at present, there are some 285,000 foreign students in Spanish-speaking countries learning the language. This is only exceeded by English, with 1.4 million students.

Without forgetting the economic weighting of cultural industries in Spanish, in Spain alone, the contribution from this sector as a whole amounted to 2.5% of GDP, or 3.2% when including all economic activities linked to intellectual property. Just in the field of books and press, which accounts for more than one third of cultural activities, it contributed 0.75% to the country’s GDP. Spain, in fact, holds eighth position among the 15 main book producers around the world, a classification in which Argentina also figures.

Spanish is also the second most important language on the international stage, the third most used at the United Nations and the fourth in the European Union, as well as the most used by American and Ibero-American integration bodies. The withdrawal of the United Kingdom from the European Union benefits the relative weighting of Spanish in the EU, which could serve as an opportunity to achieve a more important role therein.