Are you one of over 577 million Spanish speakers worldwide?

Native Spanish speakers hail from 21 different countries, as shown on the map, and increasingly from other countries too.

The latest data from the Cervantes Institute concerning the total number of Spanish speakers around the globe is quite staggering…

According to the governmental linguistics agency – whose goal is to promote the study and use of Spanish as a second language and which has a presence in 44 countries worldwide – the number of hispanoparlantes now stands at a whopping 577,256,327.

Of this total figure, native speakers make up 480 million individuals, of which almost 435 million live in the Hispanic world and the rest are broken down into the categories of “limited speakers” and students learning the language.

Spanish is the official language in 21 countries and the number of native speakers actually far eclipses that of English (399 million, according to 2018 data), which ranks third on the list. Indeed, where numbers are stagnating for English native speakers, the opposite is happening with Spanish. Español is only bested by Chinese, whose 960 million mother tongue speakers are almost as numerous as all the native English and Spanish speakers combined.

“But… I thought English was the most spoken language in the world,” I hear you scoffing.

Well, yes, you would be right… but it does depend on which source you take your data from. Despite being a stock question in pub quizzes everywhere, the issue is a bit cloudy due to the comparatively huge number of English speakers as a second language.

According to Ethnologue – a language reference and publication based in the US – the 743.5 million non-native English speakers bump the grand total up to over 1.1 billion, narrowly pipping Chinese into first place.

In any case, beer will continue to be spilt for some time to come as this issue is debated between teams of voracious expats during pub quizzes the world over.

Ethnologue’s 2017 edition also ranked Spanish as the ninth most learned second language. More recent estimates put 75 million people in the “limited speaker” category, whilst a further 21 million study the language academically.

If you’re an expat on the Costa del Sol – or indeed it is your aim to acquire a second home or move here from your country – you should take solace in the knowledge that you are part of a community of hundreds of millions of people just like you getting to grips with preterites, participles, pronouns and possessives…

For a handy guide and a few phrases to get you started, check out VIVA’s “Learning the Language” page here>>

Also, leave a comment below about your Spanish language learning experience and if you liked today’s blog!