The Cervantes Institute presented its usual yearbook of statistics, among which stands out the growth in the number of Spanish speakers compared to the world population, which represents a 7.6%
In 2005, Lula da Silva still in power, the brazilian Parliament passed its own Law of Spanish. The initiative, applauded from almost all the political and cultural spheres, was based on giving the educational system of that country with more than 200,000 teachers trained to promote Spanish as the second most important language in the country. The benefits seemed obvious in a country that tries to be the visible head of the advanced economies of the southern cone, but that is in the language a wall of glass that will incomunica with Wall Street or Brussels.
after 13 years, with the President who signed the legislation in the jail, and the arrival to the power of Jair Bolsonaro, the law of the Spanish has all the numbers to become wet paper, and slow down growth once thought possible.
On this topic, the “uncertainty” and the “influence” of the powers, legal and political, is delivered by Luis García Montero, director of the Cervantes Institute (IC), during the presentation of the yearbook of the State of Spanish in the world, published by the institution itself. The head of the IC emphasised that the best way to continue to expand the Spanish culture is and that “we may have to change a bit the direction I had been keeping, in favor of plans more editorial, journalistic, and scientific.
The most significant data of how many were submitted is that of the constant growth of the language. So, Spanish is spoken by 577 million people around the world, which means 7.6% of the world population and also an increase of one tenth compared to the estimates of last year. Of that total, about 480 million have it as their mother tongue and have been consolidated as the third language most used on the Internet, behind only English (language matrix) and the chinese (population density).
If, according to the report from the Cervantes Institute, the percentage of Spanish speakers compared to the world’s population will stabilize or even increase by the year 2050, it is de rigueur to point out also that the estimates for 2100 are speaking of a percentage decrease of 1%. The explanation, beyond the contexts, “legal and political issues that involve to the expansion and diffusion of the Spanish language”, is to be found in the demographic weight of Latin america of a century view, which will diminish substantially in favour of territories where almost no Spanish is spoken as Asia and Africa. According to David Fernández, Cheers, a professor and researcher of the University of Alcalá de Henares that has participated in the preparation of the yearbook, also has to take into account the influence “hispanic” in the united States: in less than three decades, one of every three americans will be hispanic or of descent, which “is positive, but it does not mean that all of them are going to become fluent in Spanish or to have it as their mother tongue,” he said.
Divided into four blocks ranging from statistics to pure use up of aspects such as economic power, which are barema thanks to the GDP of the countries speakers and their influence stock market to place into English as the fourth language in the world, the yearbook of the Cervantes casts and other data of interest. On the level of education, for example, are already 21.851.280 students of Spanish in the world and will dispute the second place in the ranking with the mandarin chinese and the French. In addition, according to the estimates of the institution, in the Uk it is perceived as “the language of the future” and countries such as Sweden and Denmark are adding to this trend.
If a decade ago the Internet was the great unfinished business of the Spanish, the problem is solve: 8.1% of the communication in the network occurs in Spanish, that is to say, it is the third language most used on-line. In the specific websites of the exchange of ideas as Wikipedia is already the second, as well as on the social networks Twitter and Facebook. This fact, that yes, has to be baremado taking again into account the political contexts, as in China, the three websites mentioned above are banned for the locals.
On the cultural context in which it emphasized the director of the Cervantes, the data are also encouraging: Spain is the third country that most books exported around the world, in a list that is lead by the United Kingdom and the united States. Also, with regard to the cinema, Spain, Mexico and Argentina, “filter” between the twelve countries with an industry of its own production more powerful. It is precisely with those two countries, both García Montero as Carmen Noguero Galilea, newly appointed Secretary General of the IC, showed their readiness to strengthen ties in favor of the Spanish. The quote next to get “hands on work” will be the International Congress of the Spanish Language in Córdoba, which will be held next year in the locality argentina. There, we will pay tribute to Spanish civil war exiles who ended up in Argentina, such as Alberti and expatriates and argentines who ended up in Spain in the decade of the seventies.
According to the criteria of
Learn more
