Spanish Speaking Countries

493 million people speak Spanish as a native language, making it the second most-spoken language in the 

world (source: Instituto Cervantes, 2021). As a native language, Spanish is ahead of English, but behind 

Chinese, which has the world’s most native speakers.

If we include everyone who speaks decent Spanish as a second language, we can use Spanish to communicate with 591 million people worldwide! This makes Spanish the third most-spoken language in the world, behind Chinese and English, and on par with Hindi.

Spanish is also one of the most used languages on the internet, with huge Spanish-language communities on international social networks.

Not to mention the fact that Spanish is continuing to grow in traditionally non-Spanish speaking countries.

Let’s take the United States, for example, where over 60 million people identified as being of Hispanic origin in the 2019 census, comprising more than 18% of the country’s population. The Spanish language has by far the most native speakers in the country, with 12% of the American population using it as their primary language in 2021.