Demolinguistics, the discipline that studies the structure and evolution of linguistic groups, describes phenomena of slow evolution, so that the case of the expansion of the Spanish language is like the journey of a ship that, with its inertia, is already sailing for kilometers. In 2022, its speaking community grew at a similar rate to previous years and reached 600 million people with some proficiency (7.5% of the world’s population) and 500 million native speakers. Only Mandarin Chinese has more speakers.
This is reflected in the new yearbook of the Cervantes Institute, Spanish in the world 2023, which was presented today in Madrid. According to their estimates, the Spanish-speaking population will continue to grow until 2068, when it will peak at 724 million people, although it will be a smaller percentage of the projected world population. The imminent demographic explosion of Africa, a region in which there are no native Spanish speakers, will cause the language to lose some relative weight.
The director of Cervantes, Luis García Montero, and its academic director, Carmen Pastor, explained what will depend on whether the Spanish language extends its expansion cycle. First, associating the language with an attractive cultural offer that increases the number of students. For now, the student body is very large although it is stagnant: in 2021, just over 24 million people were learning Spanish; In 2022, Cervantes had just under 24 million students. From the Institute they explain that this decline is part of a global trend: increasingly, students learn languages ??informally, outside of educational institutions and statistical radars.
The other challenge is more complex: will the children of Spanish-speaking immigrants maintain the language? Will your grandchildren do it? In the United States, the population of Latin American origin has not stopped growing, but its attachment to the family language has cracks. “There is a report that says that 85% of Hispanics in the US do not consider that speaking Spanish is mandatory to be part of their community,” explained Luis García Montero. “And that is due, among other things, to the interest in ridiculing Spanish as the language of the poor, when Hispanics in the United States, if they were united in a single country, would be the fifth largest economy in the world.”
There are statistics that go more directly to the heart of the matter. A report presented last September and prepared by the Pew Research Center in Washington D.C. It is estimated that 66% of Hispanic children in the United States under the age of five speak fluent Spanish. In 2000, that percentage was 78%. On the other hand, the percentage of Hispanic children who speak English is 72%, compared to 59% in 2000.
The Pew Research Center’s hypothesis is consistent with the data pointed out by Luis García Montero: among this American Hispanic population there is a growing number of grandchildren of immigrants. And for the third generation, no matter how much they identify as Hispanic, it is always difficult to maintain the family language. In the United States itself, the Italian language reached 3.8 million speakers in the 1950s, when immigration was most intense. Today, it is estimated that there are 700,000 people left who know Italian. Many grandparents and few grandchildren.
Van Tran, a professor at the City University of New York, measures the survival of Spanish in relative terms: “It is significantly more common than other languages ??in the US, especially Asian languages. In the third generation, a considerable number of Hispanics speak Spanish fluently. On the other hand, very few third-generation Asians master their family language,” Tran explains to EL MUNDO. “Regardless of their circumstances, most immigrant families want to retain their native language and pass it on to their children and grandchildren. However, the cost of maintenance is higher for Asian languages, given the smaller proportion of the population that uses them. “Asians do not share a common language in the United States. On the contrary, Hispanic groups do. This makes it much easier to maintain the language.”
The case of the Spanish is different because immigration is longer and more intense. The Hispanic population in the United States reached 63.6 million in 2022, up from 50.5 million in 2010. In 2022, one in five Americans is Hispanic; In 1970 the proportion was one in 20.
Gerardo Piña, a language academic in the United States and a linguist at CUNY in New York, shares the same impression: “What happened with Italian will not happen with Spanish, it will not disappear. At CUNY we had a program for what called ‘heritage students’, the children and grandchildren of migrants. And I was always surprised by the good level at which they spoke Spanish. There is a simple reason: the students perceive that they can receive an economic benefit from their parents’ language.
Has Donald Trump’s policy of hostility towards Spanish been noticed? “I think not. And I think we have seen these attitudes on other occasions and they have never had an effect,” Piña responds.
What depends on these Americans continuing to speak Spanish? In short, it is a question of social classes. Carmen Pator, from the Cervantes Institute, explains that in Europe it is easier to preserve the language among the children of migrants because it is the middle class families that value education that choose to go to France or Germany. But there are exceptions: “In Italy there is a very important flow of Ecuadorian women who work as domestic workers. For them, educating their children in Italian is a promise of social advancement.”
Cervantes also works with social stigmas. The Albuquerque center, in New Mexico, gives workshops for children, for children and grandchildren of Hispanic immigrants, aimed at increasing their appreciation of Spanish, rather than teaching them the rules of the language. The campaign to make Spanish a language of science is another part of the challenge.
The Cervantes yearbook, the twenty-fourth published by the Institute, focuses on specific cases in addition to that of the United States: that of Portugal, where there are a million Spanish speakers; that of Ukraine, where the language arrived with the children of war and grew after the Cuban Revolution; that of Iran, where Hispanic studies disappeared after the fall of the Shah in 1979 and were restarted in recent years; in Thailand, where the arrival of Spanish-speaking tourism has increased interest in the language; and in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, which illustrates the situation of Spanish in Africa.
The Spanish presidency of the European Union has also led us to focus on the spread of Spanish on the continent, where it is the second most studied language after English, and to relate the project of Hispanic culture to the values ??of the European Union.