Spanish remains the second most spoken native language in the world. This was revealed by the latest Cervantes Institute report for 2023, which detailed that at least 599 million people speak the language on the planet, 7.5% of the world's population.
However, the report also warns that although the number of Spanish speakers will continue to grow in the next five decades, the percentage of world citizens who speak the language will progressively decrease between now and the end of the century. By 2100, only 6.4% of the world's population will be able to communicate in Spanish:
It will continue to increase in absolute terms until 2071, the year in which it will exceed 718 million people, with different degrees of language proficiency. That year also represents the maximum level of this trend throughout this century, since from then on it is expected that the number of Spanish speakers will progressively reduce until reaching 693 million in the year 2100.
The institute also highlights that by 2060, the United States will have the second most Spanish speakers of any country in the world, trailing only Mexico. The report detailed that 27.5% of the U.S. population will be of Hispanic origin. Likewise, it highlighted that more than 23 million students are studying Spanish as a foreign language in 2023 (23,035,198).
'Spanish speakers are more conservative'
When analyzing Spanish in the United States, the report explained that 67.6% of the more than 60 million Hispanics in the country use Spanish in their family environment. "The Hispanic community continues to be the main demographic breadwinner in the United States, but its growth rate has slowed in recent decades," the study indicated.
The Cervantes Institute pointed out that Hispanics will have a great impact on American politics and maintained that "Spanish speakers are more conservative than English speakers on issues such as abortion, same-sex marriage and transgender people."
The 2020 presidential elections were the first elections in which Hispanics made up the largest ethnic or racial minority with the right to vote. Some 32 million Hispanics came to the polls, representing 13.3% of the American electorate. The percentage of Hispanics over 18 years of age has experienced progressive growth since the 2000 elections and currently places this community above the African-American community (12.5%), whose relative weight has barely increased in that same period, and the Asian (4.7%).
