Spanish: The Second Most Spoken Native Language in the World

Today, approximately 600 million people worldwide speak Spanish, including native speakers, learners, and bilingual individuals. Spanish is the second most spoken language in the world by native speakers, with 485 million, only behind Mandarin Chinese.

Leticia Colín Salazar, a researcher at the Juan M. Lope Blanch Center for Hispanic Linguistics at UNAM’s Institute of Philological Research (IIFl), explained this and clarified, “Although there are about 1.4 billion English speakers worldwide, only 26% of them are native speakers, whereas in Spanish, that percentage rises to 87%.”

Unlike Chinese, whose speakers are concentrated primarily in one geographic region, Spanish is spoken across 20 countries and an entire continent. The Americas represent the largest area where one can travel without changing languages—from Mexico, and even parts of the United States, to Tierra del Fuego. That’s 11,700 kilometers in a straight line where mutual understanding is possible, despite regional linguistic variations, she emphasized. Spanish spans more than 12 million square kilometers globally, covering 8.2% of the Earth’s land surface.

In celebration of Spanish Language Day at the United Nations, held on April 23, the researcher also recalled that Spanish was the first Romance language to have a grammar, written by Antonio de Nebrija in 1492. “Writing grants permanence,” she emphasized.

Mexico is the country with the highest number of Spanish speakers. Of the total 485 million native speakers, 125 million live in Mexico. There, Spanish coexists with 68 other indigenous languages, enriching its diversity. “These exchanges have made the Spanish spoken in our country incredibly diverse—it is not the same in central Mexico as it is in the north, for example,” she noted.