23 April is an important day for the huge Spanish-speaking community. Spanish Language Day is celebrated around the world, coinciding with the anniversary of the death of the most illustrious of Spanish writers - Miguel de Cervantes. A day that celebrates the social and cultural weight of a language shared by millions of people around the world, a living bond between Spain and Latin America and a first-rate communication tool in education, economics, art, science and global diplomacy.

According to experts, there are more than 6,000 languages on the five continents which, as well as allowing their inhabitants to communicate, reflect a specific way of seeing and understanding the world. And, on this long list, the Spanish language holds a position that is growing ever stronger. We will review some of the most important facts and figures about our language.

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An indisputable trait of the Spanish language is its universal nature. According to the 2020 Yearbook: Spanish around the world prepared by the Cervantes Institute, there are 489 million native Spanish-speakers in the world, out of a total of 585 million people who speak Spanish. Figures which have not stopped growing: between just 2019 and 2020, the number of native speakers grew by 6 million.

These figures show how Spanish has consolidated its position as the second most widely spoken mother tongue in the world, behind only Mandarin Chinese, and as the third most widely spoken language in the world, after English and Chinese. 7.5% of the world’s inhabitants are thus able to communicate in the language of Cervantes and García Márquez. 

In addition to the 21 countries that have Spanish as their official language, there is a noteworthy presence of the language in the United States, where more than 41 million native Spanish-speakers live and a further 15 million people are able to speak and understand it. In Europe, apart from Spain, almost 31 million citizens have Spanish language skills.

And the interest in the Spanish language has not stopped growing. Over the last decade, the number of students of Spanish has risen around the world by 60%, exceeding, for the first time, 22 million students at official centres in 110 countries (plus those in private centres), headed up by the United States, Brazil and France.

This growth is also reflected on the Internet, where Spanish has consolidated its position as the third most used language, behind only English and Mandarin Chinese. Of the 4.59 million Internet users, almost 8% communicate in Spanish. Added to which, Spanish is the second most used language in the number of scientific texts published, ahead of French, German and Chinese, and behind only English.

Although this is one of the most extensively used languages in the world, its origins date back 1,000 years to the Iberian Peninsula, and perhaps even further.

During the centuries of Romanisation, Latin was influenced by the Iberian, Celtiberian and Tartessian languages. As from the 5th Century, after the fall of the Roman Empire, Vulgar Latin began its own evolution to the Romance varieties on the Iberian Peninsula. Among these, the Castilian Romanesque dialect, which took shape between the 9th and the 13th Centuries. It is in this period that we can find the first writings in Spanish: the Cartularies of Valpuesta, which contain the first written words in Castilian Spanish; and the Glosas Emilianenses which, with traits from Rioja and Navarre-Aragon, are the first to show a Romanesque grammatical structure.

A key time for Castilian Spanish was during the reign of Alfonso X ‘The Wise’ – King of Castile from 1252 to 1284 - who, through the School of Translators of Toledo, elevated the prestige of written Castilian Spanish – considered vulgar until that time – in his court and his lands, and standardised it. This became known as Early Modern (or auric) Spanish, the variant used from the end of the 15th Century to the end of the 17th Century, which amounted to a transition between Mediaeval and Modern Spanish. This was the form of Spanish used in what was known as the Golden Age in Spanish literature – led by Cervantes, Góngora, Quevedo and Lope de Vega – spoken by those Spaniards that arrived in the Americas – a continent where it would spread over the following centuries, acquiring its own traits and enriching the language. It was also during this period that the Gramatica castellana [Castilian Grammar] written by Antonio de Nebrija was published. This was not just the first treatise in the Spanish language, but of any modern European language.

Over the following centuries, Modern Spanish consolidated its position in all types of written publications: the first newspapers, encyclopaedias and dictionaries would be published, such as the Tesoro de la lengua castellana o española [Treasury of Castilian or Spanish Language] (1611), by Sebastián de Covarrubias – the first monolingual dictionary in Spanish. And then, in 1713, the Royal Language Academy was founded, with the aim of maintaining the unity and good use of the language, followed by academies in the rest of the Spanish-speaking countries during the 19th and 20th Centuries, united since 1951 in the Association of Spanish-Language Academies.

Spanish or Castilian Language also co-exists in Spain with other languages and dialects, as a result of the country’s passionate history, reflecting the cultural diversity that characterises us around the world.

Of the 47 million inhabitants of Spain, more than 21 million live in officially bilingual autonomous regions; in other words, those in which, as well as Castilian Spanish, another co-official language exists, as recognised by the Spanish Constitution and by regional Statutes of Autonomy.

In fact, Article 3 of the Spanish Constitution recognises that “the wealth of the different linguistic modalities of Spain form part of the cultural heritage, which will be subject to special respect and protection”, while establishing that “Castilian Spanish is the official Spanish language of the State, and that all Spanish people have a duty to learn it and a right to use it”.

By way of our commitment to respect and promote the different languages of Spain, our country was the first signatory of the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages of the Council of Europe, whose experts acknowledged Spain, some years ago, as a model of linguistic protection, particularly in higher education in Catalonia.

As well as Spanish Language Day, World Book Day is also celebrated on 23 April, intrinsically bound to the development and expansion of Castilian Spanish, and a leading economic driver of Spain’s cultural panorama. In 2019, books generated more than 2.42 billion euros, according to the report on the Domestic Book Trade by the Federation of Guilds of Spanish Publishers, the sixth straight year of growth in the sector before the Covid-19 crisis. More than 82,000 titles were produced that year by the 3,000 active publishers in Spain.

Revenue that places Spain in the global top 10 of publishing powers, in ninth position in market value behind the United States, China, Germany, the United Kingdom, Japan, France, India and South Korea, in the report entitled BookMap. How big is global publishing? (2017) by Rüdiger Wischenbart. This thus makes us the leading publishing power among Spanish-speaking countries (Mexico, the second, stands in 19th position).

The more than 80,000 titles published in Spain make us the fifth ranked country in the world in terms of titles published, according to the report entitled The Global Publishing Industry in 2018 by the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) and the International Publishers Association (IPA), behind only the United Kingdom, Italy, Russia and France.

Some of the large Spanish publishing groups, such as Grupo Planeta and Grupo Santillana, are ranked as the 20th and 29th most powerful publishing groups in the world in the Global 50. The World Ranking of the Publishing Industry 2019 by Rüdiger Wischenbart and Livres Hebdo.