Overview
- Instituto Cervantes’ Anuario 2025 reports roughly 635 million total Spanish speakers, including about 520 million native speakers, placing Spanish third after Mandarin and Hindi as India’s population growth lifts Hindi to second.
- Learners stand at more than 24 million today, with Cervantes projecting that sustained institutionalization of teaching could push student numbers toward 100 million by century’s end.
- Spanish’s migratory profile grows, with one in ten native speakers living outside Spanish‑speaking countries and over 120 million potential speakers abroad, including more than 45 million across the European Union.
- The report cautions that moves to declare English the official language in the United States could erode social and linguistic rights for Hispanics, and includes a Harvard Observatory study that disputes claims of a mass 2024 shift of Hispanic voters to President Trump.
- Cervantes pairs the data with institutional steps, including an agreement with UNAM to create an Observatorio del Español in Mexico and a new Los Angeles center focused on heritage Spanish, as Spain’s foreign minister frames the language as a diplomatic asset.