The Instituto Cervantes has launched its latest yearbook, Spanish in the World 2024, with the most up-to-date statistics on the language’s international presence and future projections. It shows that in 2024, for the first time, Spanish speakers worldwide will exceed 600 million people.
This figure includes almost 500 million native speakers in addition to those with limited competence (around 78 million) and students (more than 24 million). The report also highlights that Spanish remains the second mother tongue on the planet, after Mandarin Chinese, and its relevance is recognized as it’s one of the main choices for users of platforms such as Netflix and Spotify, as well as for video gamers.
According to Cervantes director Luis García Montero, these figures are “reasons for pride, but they should not lead to complacency.” In this sense, he has highlighted the “joy” conveyed by the good health of Spanish “during a difficult period for the world,” alluding to the problems of centers in places like Beirut, Tel Aviv, and Moscow, although also mentioning the “difficult situation” today in the Valencian Community due to “the fury of the rain,” which led the minister of culture, Ernest Urtasun, to cancel his planned participation in this event. “We have many challenges ahead of us and we want to continue moving forward, but we can be pleased with the cultural strength of Spanish in the world, which has become a benchmark of democratic value against the reactionary and violent thinking that is emerging,” he added.
The 652-page 25th edition of the book includes updated data on Spanish as well as several articles aimed at analyzing specific situations of the language in Spanish-speaking countries: Spain, Mexico, Cuba, Peru, Argentina, Colombia, Chile, and Equatorial Guinea. The study highlights that the number of native Spanish speakers outside of Hispanic countries is more than 45 million, while the total number of Spanish speakers outside of Hispanic countries is close to 100 million, mainly due to migration. Thanks to this, the demographics of Spanish “continue to grow, but not in the same proportion as a few decades ago, so the keys to Spanish growth must be found in the teaching of Spanish as a second and foreign language and the maintenance of Spanish within migrant families around the world,” according to the academic director of the institution, Carmen Pastor Villalba. This year, more than 24 million are learning Spanish worldwide, and over the last ten years, the number of learners has been increasing at an average rate of 2%.
The yearbook has a section dedicated to the relationship between language and culture and addresses various aspects such as communication between cultures, language, and society; the cultural action of the Cervantes Institute; the role of literature in language teaching; the role of fiction series in the Spanish cultural industry; music as a tool for cultural dissemination; the economic impact of video games in Spanish; and scientific culture as an opportunity.
Spanish in Film and Music
According to the vice-dean of the Faculty of Communication and Arts at Spain’s Nebrija University, Marta Saavedra Llamas—who was responsible for some of the studies carried out on fiction—this is a “very positive moment for a very stable [Spanish film] industry.” In 2024, La sociedad de la nieve, a film directed by Juan Antonio Bayona, was ranked second among the most-watched non-English-language films in the history of Netflix, with 94.4 million views, and another Spanish film, Nowhere, by Albert Pintó, was in third place with 85.7 million views. Meanwhile, in 2023, about a quarter of the songs on the hit lists of portals such as YouTube and Spotify used Spanish; this was a year in which English-language music consumption fell by 3.8%, exactly the same percentage that Spanish-language music consumption increased. In addition, more than half of the artists who have generated more than $10,000 on Spotify are from countries where English is not the first language, mainly due to continued growth in the Latin music market in recent years (19.4% in 2023).
The yearbook includes other figures, such as a study focused on video games and Spanish, indicating that Spain is positioned as the eighth country in world production of video games, in a global market that in 2022 earned 184.4 billion dollars from more than 3.228 billion players. Figures are also provided on the current situation of Spanish in the US, where Hispanics with the ability to vote in the 2024 presidential elections are more than 36 million (which represents 14.7% of the total American electorate).
About 7% of the books published in the world are in Spanish (sixth highest). There is also a section of current reports on the Instituto Cervantes, such as those dedicated to the geographies of Spanish, the value of certification, or emerging pedagogies.
Visit https://cvc.cervantes.es/lengua/anuario/anuario_24 to download the book.
