Spanish on the rise? Maybe not.

Living in the United States, we are home to a diverse array of people. Simply walking through campus here at Loyola, one can be witness to many different languages being spoken, whether on their cell phones or in conversation walking to class. Either way, I cannot help but notice how often the other language I overhear is Spanish. Although Spanish is commonly spoken through campus, other places of the United States, such as my hometown of Miami, Florida, prove to be predominately Spanish speaking these days. Statistics show that Spanish is the third most commonly spoken language in the world today. To those of us who speak English on a day-to-day basis might guess that English is number one or two. However, this is untrue. There are 330 million English speakers in the world, whereas there are 346 million Spanish speakers. Immigration continues to swell the ranks of Spanish speakers in this country. There were more than 17 million of them by 1990, more than the combined total of speakers of all other non-languages.

Today Spanish is so widely spoken in the United States that it is generally considered to be either the fourth or the fifth largest Spanish-speaking country in the world (after Mexico, Spain, Colombia, and possible Argentina). This beautiful language is becoming so popular that Spanish has a status of official language (along with English) in the state of New Mexico and in Puerto Rico, which is a self-governing unincorporated territory of the United States. Generally, US Hispanics (13.4% of the population in 2002) are bilingual to some degree. A study by Simmons Market Research found that 19% of the Hispanic population speak only Spanish while 9% speak only English, 55% have limited bilingual proficiency and 17% are fully bilingual. Therefore, one can see that those who speak Spanish may sometimes struggle with the differences in language preferences between work, school, and every day activities.

Therefore, it seems as though Spanish is growing at a fast rate in the Untied States. This may not be entirely true. For instance, Although Latin American immigrants have various levels of English proficiency, Hispanics who are second-generation American in the United States almost all speak English, but only about 50 percent speak Spanish at home. Two-thirds of third-generation Mexican Americans speak English exclusively at home.

Thus, it is up to the people of the United States to decide if this beautiful language should continue to flourish in our nation or not. Either way, the native Spanish speakers will continue the fight to speak their native tongue regardless of their geographic location.


*Statistics for this post were found from
http://www.answers.com/topic/spanish-in-the-united-states
http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/JWCRAWFORD/Castro1.htm