Spanish, a language that is in vogue
The language is studied by 76% of the total U.S. elementary and secondary foreign language student body. More than 24 million people worldwide study Spanish.
Library of the Royal Spanish Academy (RAE).
Spanish is all the rage in the United States. It is the country with the most students of Spanish in the world (8.6 million).
In comparative terms, Spanish is by far the most widely learned language in the nation's formal education system: 76% of all foreign language students in primary and secondary schools and 50% of university students study it.
Overall, Spanish is one of the most studied foreign languages in the world, with more than 24 million learners in the 2024 estimate. This figure has been growing steadily but slowly over the past ten years at a rate of 2% per year.
"The situation of Spanish in the United States significantly affects the international transcendence of this language. The United States is a focus of economic and cultural prestige, whose relevance reaches the languages that convey communication within the country," explained the Cervantes Institute in its annual report on the language.
Similarly, the report detailed that data from the American Community Survey (U.S. Census Bureau, 2022) reveals that Spanish is spoken in the homes of 13.3% of Americans, which is almost double that of all other languages combined, with the exception, of course, of English.
"Considering that the U.S. Hispanic population in 2022 was 63.7 million (19.1% of the total population), the percentage of this population that maintained Spanish at home would be around 67%, although 75% of Hispanics claim to be able to hold a conversation in Spanish," the report highlights.
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