The Spanish language today

There are currently about as many native speakers of Spanish as of English (around 350 million), and, with Spanish-speaking populations continuing to grow, it is anticipated it will remain the third most widely spoken language in the world after Chinese and English for the first half of the twenty-first century. It is the official language (or the principal official language) of some twenty nations, and is also widely spoken in the USA, where the rapidly growing Hispanic population is now the largest ‘ethnic’ group. The areas of Central and South America over which Spanish is spoken are enormous: for example, Mexico City is as far from Buenos Aires as Beijing is from London. It can quickly be appreciated, therefore, that the task of providing a guide to contemporary Spanish usage is a daunting one. The linguistic consequence of the diffusion of Spanish in the New World has been the appearance of many local differences in speech; and within Spain itself there are also considerable differences from region to region. At the same time, speakers from different areas are generally mutually intelligible, and the written language, while sometimes reflecting differences in speech, maintains a remarkable degree of uniformity which, because of the wide acceptance of a commonly agreed norm amongst the national Academias (see 1.5), seems likely to last.

Local variety and standard

The Spanish standard is generally taken to be the speech of Old Castile.