As a speaker of Spanish, you will be able to have a conversation with over 500 million people around the world! And that isn’t even counting people like yourself who are learning it as a second language.

Even more amazingly, the number of hispanohablantes (Spanish speakers) is predicted to increase. In fact, the population of officially Spanish-speaking nations is believed to exceed 750 million people by 2050, according to Instituto Cervantes.

So learning Spanish is a very good choice 😄

🎧 This is how you say hispanohablante in Spanish.

This image shows the 21 countries in the world where Spanish is counted as the official language: Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Equatorial Guinea, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Puerto Rico, Spain, Uruguay, and Venezuela.

🎬 This is a video of native speakers from some of these countries saying hello.

The countries in the world that have the most Spanish speakers are Mexico, Colombia, the United Stated and Argentina. Perhaps surprisingly, the United States comes in third (tied with Argentina), despite Spanish not being the official language. However, over 40 million native Spanish speakers have made the U.S. their home.

The history of Spanish in the Americas

The Spanish language arrived in the American continents with Christopher Columbus in 1492. Thankfully, indigenous cultures weren’t eradicated and 11 million people in the Americas still speak their indigenous languages today. The influence from these indigenous languages can be seen in the way that Latin American Spanish differs from Castilian Spanish (the Spanish they speak in Spain).

The history of Castilian Spanish

Castilian Spanish is the version of Spanish spoken in Spain, Europe. It stems from Latin which was the official language of the Roman empire that occupied this part of the world up until the Middle Ages. Therefore, Spanish (alongside for example French and Italian) is called a “Romance language” ❤️

But Castilian Spanish is not only influenced by Latin. It is in fact also highly influenced by Arabic!

In the 11th-13th centuries, Christian states expelled Muslims who had otherwise ruled most of the Iberian Peninsula since the collapse of the Roman Empire. Christians called it a “reconquering”, and so the event is referred to as the Reconquista.

🎧 This is how you say Reconquista in Spanish.

In the wake of Muslims leaving the Iberian Peninsula, the kingdom of Castile grew and with it its Latin dialect, heavily influenced by Arabic from the previous rulers on the Iberian Peninsula. And so, we got Castilian Spanish.

You can find thousands of words in Castilian Spanish that are similar or even sound exactly the same as their Arabic equivalents, for example: