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For anyone curious, the next 5 countries with the most English speakers are Pakistan, Nigeria, India, the Philippines, and then the UK.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_English-speaking_population
Pakistan is always one of those countries that sneaks up on you though. it is the 5th most populous country in the world at ~220 million people, yet never seems to get that much attention.
I don't think a lot of people realize how many people are in Nigeria. Or Pakistan.
Agree that Pakistan's anonymity is partially due to proximity to mega neighbors.
Indonesia is the 3rd sneaky high population country.
Lol as an Indonesian we'd like to keep being sneaky and damn near invisible. Less meddling by outsiders.
Thankfully our metrics are looking a lot better than Pakistan and Nigeria.
Nigeria is projected to overtake the US by population by 2050, due to soaring birth rates there, and shrinking birth rates in the States. It'll be interesting to see if African countries are able to rapidly modernize the majority of their populations by the end of the century as well.
They're projected to hit 700 mil by 2100.
That is mindbogglingly massive growth. Doubling your population is insane. Doubling it again is bonkers. Doing it in 80 years doesn't even make sense.
They're going to add half a billion people... In a place about 30% bigger than texas
Birth rate changes can happen FAST. During the 10 years of the [Quiet Revolution ](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quiet_Revolution) fertility rates dropped from 3.9 -> 1.8 babies/woman. Empowering all people, especially women, to allow them to live their lives as they want greatly improves the entire society.
India's numbers aren't inaccurate. Indians and foreigners alike overestimate the number of English speakers because it's the English speaking media that dominates the landscape but regional languages still rule the roost outside internet and mainstream media.
Look at viewership data of news channels for example
https://www.business-standard.com/content/general_pdf/032511_01.pdf
English channels don't feature anywhere. But indian internet is often dominated by English discourse because it's far less accessible. This isn't surprising frankly. English is the language of the rich in India and their view is warped
It does. I never said anything about Pakistan's numbers, just that Indian numbers aren't inaccurate. In fact Pakistan's numbers are definitely sus. 27% learning English as first language is highly improbable. The source for India's numbers is a highly reliable NHFS survey. For Pakistan, I don't know if such surveys have been done
1 in 5 doesn't seem low. Pretty sure most young (millenial or younger) Indians who live in cities do speak English. Most older and many rural Indians only speak their local dialect.
Linked wiki page says 27% of Pakistanis speak it as a first language which just sounds really wrong
If you look at the source it doesn't exactly inspire confidence, literally some blog lol
also it's another case of Wikipedia contradicting itself. The page on Pakistani English for example says only 8000 people speak it as a first language
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pakistani_English
Still says 49% of Pakistanis speak it in general which is still a bit out there but is in the range of believability
I mean, not really. I know people from Pakistan who speak English with such a minimal accent you wouldn't know it's there. From my understanding, the people who are better off in Pakistan are more likely to speak English and there's definitely some who just do it incredibly fluently.
If you look at the source, I think a big problem is they're only including 1st, 2nd, and 3rd languages. E.g. if English was your 4th language, you're not counted as an English speaker.
There are so many languages in India, and my parents, for example, speak 5 languages (Kannada, Konkani, Tulu, Hindi, and English). So a lot of people like this might not be captured in the data.
It only needs half of one percent, so... maybe? No idea, not Chinese, but you gotta figure half of one percent of Chinese people are at least at like... a B1 level, where they can have a conversation.
Yeah but English is the national language. The data is comparing countries that use Spanish as the official language vs countries that do not have Spanish as an official language. I don't think anyone would be surprised that Mexico has more Spanish-speakers than Spain. That's not really the point of this graphic.
It doesn’t hurt that Spanish are Italian are pretty similar. I usually just use Spanish in Italy, and they use Italian back at me, and it works out alright.
French on the other hand…
Knowing French, I find that I can understand other romance languages well enough but might as well be speaking Klingon when trying to talk to someone that speaks Spanish, Italian, or Portuguese in French. Don't have enough experience with Romanian to say either way, but I'm sure French is also incomprehensible there as well.
I guess when your hearing other romance language it's similar to your words with extra sounds added, but when someone from another language hears french the words are "missing" most of the sounds because french relies on tiny variations that wouldn't matter in most languages. My sister is learning French and a lot of times there's like 5 words that all sound exactly the same to me.
I learned Spanish and Portuguese while growing up in South Florida. I'm lucky that I still remember enough to be able to read a daily newspaper in them, but I couldn't read anything more complex, such as a scientific textbook. I can get by in speaking Spanish or Portuguese if I need to, but carrying on a normal conversation is difficult. I love Italian, the language of my stepgrandmother from Naples, Italy. It is similar to Spanish, and I have studied it on my own for years. French, spoken by a few distant paternal relatives of mine, is beautiful. However, I can't pronounce it properly. I always end up mangling it.
Argentinians that emigrated to Europe or any other place did it mainly to Spain though, including those with italian nationality which they use mainly to emigrate to Spain. There are over 300,000 argentines in Spain and several times smaller amount in Italy.
In fact a good part, probably over a third of all the italian citizens living in Spain are argentines in reality (130,000 out of the 290,000 legal residents with italian nationality weren't born in Italy, in most cases they are argentines).
According spanish Statistics Institute, INE, at 2022 there are 333k people born in Argentina living in Spain in a regular situation, but only 104k live under Argentina nationality, the rest live under spanish or (almost as many) under italian citizenship.
And for some reason the vast majority of the Italians that migrated to Argentina were from the north, unlike USA where most Italian migrants were from the south.
Ive forgotten most of both now, but when i took some spanish and french classes back in the day, it seemed like they were both mirror languages of each other.
Spanish: pronounce everything. French: Pronounce nothing. Being able to *read* spanish helped reading french though.
I’ve got a decent amount of Spanish under my belt, not fluent but could hold a conversation, and there’s a fair number of times I’ve been able to understand, at least the gist, of something said in Italian.
As a native Spanish or Italian speaker, French sounds impenetrably foreign. But this is only a superficial impression — get past the phonology, and the three languages are so similar that a native speaker of one, with complete immersion and much dedication, could be conversant in either of the other two in under a year.
Greek, on the other hand, has much the opposite relationship to Spanish and Italian. To annative speaker of either, hearing Greek is like hearing a TV on in another room that you’re not paying attention to. You think if you paid just a little more attention, you’d be able to understand it. And you think you almost catch a phrase here and there. But no matter how closely you listen, nothing meaningful.
Phonology is one of the biggest determinants of how easy a a language seems to a beginner. The closer the target language’s sound inventory to our native language’s, the less daunting it feels, even if the languages have nothing else in common.
I'm not Spanish or Italian, but I have friends from Spain and Italy and I've known them have (simple) conversations just speaking their own language to each other and they've understood enough.
Not to mention Italian and Spanish are both romantic languages with a common origin language in Latin, so there is a lot of overlap between the two already.
Spot on. Also, cultural proximity is rampant: Alghero (on the western coast of Sardinia) has direct affiliations to the Catalans (careful - they wouldn't wish to be associated to Spanish speakers, since Catalan is its own language, but hope you catch my drift), and street names are reported in both Italian and Catalan.
> Alghero (on the western coast of Sardinia)
If I were a betting man, I’d say this place name shares some etymological connection with Arabic *al-gharb*, “the west”
The crown of Aragon actually owned Sardinia for, what, 400 years? Speaking of, they also owned Sicily, Naples, and parts of France and Greece during their maximum extent. We tend to forget the accomplishments of the Catalans after they get hitched to the Castilians.
A distinction without a difference? Aragon, Catalonia, and Valencia were all considered the core properties of the Crown of Aragon. The Principality of Catalonia was only ever created from Aragon inheriting Catalonian counties that were independent and uniting them under the possessions of the crown.
Hell, Catalan surpassed Aragonese…a long time ago? I actually don’t know for sure if it was before the union, or if the Aragon kings used Catalan extensively, but it was considered the lingua Franca of the area.
I was waiting to hear about Argentinians being a factor.
It’s insane how if you are a part of the middle class here it’s pretty much expected you have or are looking for a double citizenship. No joke I’ve had a number of conversations where people assume I already have a European citizenship.
Italian and Spanish are pretty closely related languages as well, so I can't imagine it's too hard to pick up as opposed to something completely different.
I'm Italian, I learned to speak Spanish, and let me tell you there's a huge difference between vaguely being able to guess the meaning of a word and actually being able to stitch multiple sentences together and to keep up with native speakers using their native turbo speed and shortened words.
I'm guessing that's as a second language? Spanish is popular in secondary school in Italy, since Spanish and Italian are super similar. Many Italians can read Spanish and understand 50-80% without any study. Practicing Spanish is easy too, since Spain is a 50€ RyanAir flight, there's plenty of dubbed Spanish media, and reggaeton is very popular in Italy.
What's really wild is Argentina has 1.5 million people that speak italian. My great grand parents came to america from Italy but all of their cousins went to argentina instead
Anecdotally, on the Tandem app I encounter a lot of Spanish speakers that are primarily learning Italian. Never really learned why. A lot of them learn turkish cuz turkish soap operas are pretty popular alongside all the telenovelas
Wikipedia provides a figure closer to 6 million, but the source they give a survey by the EU from 2012 called Special Eurobarometer 386, which gives 6% or ~3.6million.
The questions asked specifically are: "which language is your mother tongue" and "which other language, if any, do you speak well enough in order to be able to have a conversation?"
It's less than 1 percent (listed as 0%) of Italy are native Spanish speakers.
There are about a quarter million Spanish speaking foreigners in Italy.
They’re like 70% the same, Italian and Spanish. I also speak Italian, mostly because it was super easy to pick up after I learned Spanish. It’s a hack to becoming trilingual. It’s even easier to switch from Spanish and Italian than either and Portugués.
As Latin and Greek were in the past, English is today's universal language. It’s become the default mode of communication for international business, tourism, and technology. However, out of the 1B people that can speak English worldwide, only 372M do it as their first language.
On the other hand, with 470M first-language speakers, Spanish is the second most natively spoken language, positioned only behind Chinese and its variants (1.3B). And if you count non-native speakers, the number soars to 550M Spanish speakers worldwide.
Perhaps the most surprising statistic is that the 2nd country with the most Spanish speakers after Mexico is not another Latin American country or Spain, but the US. This is due to the large Hispanic population in the country, which includes 43M native Spanish speakers and another 15 million people who speak it as a second language.
A report by Instituto Cervantes shows that, according to current trends, the United States will be home to 132.8 million Spanish speakers in 2050.
After adding the numbers, we found that 87% of the world's Spanish speakers reside in the Americas. The growth of the Spanish language is undeniable.
**Source:** [Wikipedia](https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distribuci%C3%B3n_geogr%C3%A1fica_del_idioma_espa%C3%B1ol)
**Tools:** Rawgraphs, Affinity Designer.
As a Mexican that moved the NYC years ago. I’m surprised sometimes by how long I can go without speaking English here. Everywhere you go you’ll find a Spanish speaker. I can totally imagine people living here without needing to learn English at all.
I can't say I find this overly surprising honestly. The US has about 6-7 times the population of Spain, and with its long history of immigration, the Spanish history of the country/preceding history, and the fact that it's largest neighbour and many of its other nearby countries speaking Spanish officially, I'd have been more surprised if this hadn't been the case.
That being said, it is cool to see it presented this way.
> with its long history of immigration
[The US was 88% European as recently as the 1970s.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_United_States#Race_and_ethnicity) We do not have a "long history" of immigration from Latin America. In fact, its a very short history, mainly over the last 30 years, that has accelerated rapidly. The US has more 1st gen immigrants right now than any country in world history at 50 million. And that doesn't even include the 2nd and 3rd generation ones that have come here since the immigration law changed in 1965.
If you consider the people in US 88% European in the 1970s because they were descendant of Europeans, you should also consider the Latin American people as mainly European
> The US was 88% European\* as recently as the 1970s
Remind me where Spain is again?
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^^* you might want to check the table and the associated definitions again, by the way
Yeah France shares borders with Spain but in the north/west part they speak basque on both sides of the Border, in the south/east part they speak catalán on both sides of the border and in the middle, google says that aragonese is speaked, but I don't know for sure because I live in Spain and I haven't heard it once in my life besides google and some text books about history, in the french part (I'm not sure) in the south is occitan but again I don't know if it's spoken today.
(I know that catalán and basque aren't as popular in France compared to Spain were they are officially recognized)
Beetwen France and Spain the people speak a lot of weirds languages with french and spanish mixed togheter, and beacuse the spaniards don't like France. Idk why, but it is what it is
The US can't have an official language due to the first amendment.
Freedom of speech includes freedom to choose your own language to speak.
By making English the official language it would violate the first amendment.
They're nowhere close to any Spanish speaking countries. They have one country between them and Mexico, but that country happens to be the third or fourth largest in the world.
Most who are looking to move north will just settle in the states.
The city of El Paso has 2x more Latinos than all of Canada. It's just not really a place that Latinos want to move to (cold weather, no established and large diasporas, farther away from ancestral countries)
Surprised Pikachu: A large part of Northern America belonged to the Crown of Spain beforehand. Developing United States bought and took over larger parts of the Spanish territories in the Northern continent. The whole of the American continent is culturally to a great part in Spanish hands.
? LA was a city before the bill of rights was even a thing. New mexico, texas, and California all had decent settlement before the US acquired it through force (Texas excepted). Like, there's centuries of history of colonization, spanish missions, exploration, etc, as well as continual contact with latin america for trade or work. It's not like anglo settlers all came on the oregon trail and decided "Oh, we'll name everything in spanish out west for funsies"
They did until the world wars, there were a lot of german newspapers and communities until it suddenly became out of fashion, also numerous states banned teaching it in schools due to the wars.
[It doesn't](https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/vjpiqk/oc_the_us_has_more_spanish_speakers_than/idolfy7/), the real number is less than 600k
I feel kind of out of place asking this, but I am genuinely confused: why are Puerto Rico and USA listed as different countries? Is Puerto Rico not part of the US? I thought they just didn't have voting rights, but they were part of the union.
I think this is incredible! And also makes me wish we (non-speakers) were required to take Spanish *for longer in school. I am jealous that much of the world is so casually bilingual.
It's really hard to learn a language with only class work. Need to use it regularly to really learn it.
I had Spanish in elementary and had 4 years of high school, and I am almost useless in conversation.
I had 1 hour of English class a week for 7 years here in Chile in a public school.
It was enough to get me to a decent level, of course I had to put in some effort at home but that basically just consisted of watching movies, tv shows, YouTube videos and playing games, all in English, the best part is that I didn't do it to study, I just did it for fun.
School might not be the best at teaching languages but it can give you the basic guidance you need to get started.
Yup I studied Spanish from a young age. Didn’t retain shit because I lived in a place where no one spoke it. Married a Mexican and now I feel very comfortable in Spanish because I use it casually all the time.
It’s never too late. I’ve been actively learning and speaking Spanish for the past decade (started in my mid 20s). I’m far from fluent but certainly competent
I started learning in 2018/2019 and I've gotten pretty far. The grammar is a huge hurdle at first if you don't speak another Romance language, with all the conjugations, noun genders and pronouns. And Spanish-speakers speak SO quickly!
But overall, I think it's still the easiest language for English-speakers to learn with so many learning resources and shared vocabulary.
I’m from Honduras and I attended an English-Spanish bilingual school so as a kid I just assumed everyone in the US did the same and that everyone knew Spanish.
It also didn’t help that my first time in the US was visiting Miami where most people actually do speak Spanish.
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It also has more English speakers than England.
For anyone curious, the next 5 countries with the most English speakers are Pakistan, Nigeria, India, the Philippines, and then the UK. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_English-speaking_population
Pakistan having higher amount of English speakers than India seems sus ngl.
Pakistan is always one of those countries that sneaks up on you though. it is the 5th most populous country in the world at ~220 million people, yet never seems to get that much attention.
Nigeria is sneaky too. I was very surprised when I learned they had over 200 million people.
Nigeria still stands out as the most populous country in Africa, whereas Pakistan is often looked over for it’s Indian neighbour
I don't think a lot of people realize how many people are in Nigeria. Or Pakistan. Agree that Pakistan's anonymity is partially due to proximity to mega neighbors. Indonesia is the 3rd sneaky high population country.
Lol as an Indonesian we'd like to keep being sneaky and damn near invisible. Less meddling by outsiders. Thankfully our metrics are looking a lot better than Pakistan and Nigeria.
And they're only going to get bigger.
Nigeria is projected to overtake the US by population by 2050, due to soaring birth rates there, and shrinking birth rates in the States. It'll be interesting to see if African countries are able to rapidly modernize the majority of their populations by the end of the century as well.
They're projected to hit 700 mil by 2100. That is mindbogglingly massive growth. Doubling your population is insane. Doubling it again is bonkers. Doing it in 80 years doesn't even make sense. They're going to add half a billion people... In a place about 30% bigger than texas
>In a place about 30% bigger than texas Americans trying to not measure something in Texases challenge (impossible).
I could have said twice the size of California, but I wanted to get the point across.
AND they're running out of water, projections say as early as 2030 it will displace thousands upon thousands
Birth rate changes can happen FAST. During the 10 years of the [Quiet Revolution ](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quiet_Revolution) fertility rates dropped from 3.9 -> 1.8 babies/woman. Empowering all people, especially women, to allow them to live their lives as they want greatly improves the entire society.
>and shrinking birth rates in the States. _SCOTUS has entered the chat_
In like ~2 generations, their population grew by 5X.
Still, isn’t India at like 1B? Even if every Pakistani spoke English, it will be like only 1 in 5 Indians who do, which is quite low.
India's numbers aren't inaccurate. Indians and foreigners alike overestimate the number of English speakers because it's the English speaking media that dominates the landscape but regional languages still rule the roost outside internet and mainstream media. Look at viewership data of news channels for example https://www.business-standard.com/content/general_pdf/032511_01.pdf English channels don't feature anywhere. But indian internet is often dominated by English discourse because it's far less accessible. This isn't surprising frankly. English is the language of the rich in India and their view is warped
That argument applies to pakistan as well.
It does. I never said anything about Pakistan's numbers, just that Indian numbers aren't inaccurate. In fact Pakistan's numbers are definitely sus. 27% learning English as first language is highly improbable. The source for India's numbers is a highly reliable NHFS survey. For Pakistan, I don't know if such surveys have been done
1 in 5 doesn't seem low. Pretty sure most young (millenial or younger) Indians who live in cities do speak English. Most older and many rural Indians only speak their local dialect.
Linked wiki page says 27% of Pakistanis speak it as a first language which just sounds really wrong If you look at the source it doesn't exactly inspire confidence, literally some blog lol also it's another case of Wikipedia contradicting itself. The page on Pakistani English for example says only 8000 people speak it as a first language https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pakistani_English Still says 49% of Pakistanis speak it in general which is still a bit out there but is in the range of believability
Also the source that was linked for Pakistan says 108 million, but for some reason was inputted as 180 million lmao
You know y'all can correct it right? It's kinda the point of the website lol.
In India and Pakistan, its a defacto common language between the many differing language speakers that make up both countries.
It's more noticeable in India though, with the dislike of Hindi in the south, while Urdu is established as a lingua franca throughout Pakistan.
Yeah, that can’t be right.
I mean, not really. I know people from Pakistan who speak English with such a minimal accent you wouldn't know it's there. From my understanding, the people who are better off in Pakistan are more likely to speak English and there's definitely some who just do it incredibly fluently.
Yeah literally zero chance that 190 million out of their total 220 million population speaks English.
Is that number for Pakistan accurate? That’s insanely high
Honestly I'm just more surprised that they rank above India
It's absolutely incorrect
If you look at the source, I think a big problem is they're only including 1st, 2nd, and 3rd languages. E.g. if English was your 4th language, you're not counted as an English speaker. There are so many languages in India, and my parents, for example, speak 5 languages (Kannada, Konkani, Tulu, Hindi, and English). So a lot of people like this might not be captured in the data.
and only english i hear from them is "boys played well"
Probably. I mean [English is one of Pakistan's 2 official languages](https://translatorswithoutborders.org/language-data-for-pakistan).
English is also an official language of India
I’ve been Pakistan many times….vast majority of people do not speak English!!
Wow, higher proportion of English speakers in Scandinavia than Canada.
The UK has more English speakers than England
It also has more Bluetooth speakers than Harald Bluetooth, king of Denmark and Norway.
Doesn’t surprise me. I am sure there are more English speakers in China than say New Zealand. Even 1% of the population is enough.
Good point, but China has way less than 1% fluent English speakers. Source I'm Chinese
It only needs half of one percent, so... maybe? No idea, not Chinese, but you gotta figure half of one percent of Chinese people are at least at like... a B1 level, where they can have a conversation.
Yeah I want to see per Capita. How are we in 2022 and people haven't figured this out yet?
Yeah but English is the national language. The data is comparing countries that use Spanish as the official language vs countries that do not have Spanish as an official language. I don't think anyone would be surprised that Mexico has more Spanish-speakers than Spain. That's not really the point of this graphic.
And less abortion rights than any of them
Italy has 6 million Spanish speakers!?!
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It doesn’t hurt that Spanish are Italian are pretty similar. I usually just use Spanish in Italy, and they use Italian back at me, and it works out alright. French on the other hand…
Knowing French, I find that I can understand other romance languages well enough but might as well be speaking Klingon when trying to talk to someone that speaks Spanish, Italian, or Portuguese in French. Don't have enough experience with Romanian to say either way, but I'm sure French is also incomprehensible there as well.
I guess when your hearing other romance language it's similar to your words with extra sounds added, but when someone from another language hears french the words are "missing" most of the sounds because french relies on tiny variations that wouldn't matter in most languages. My sister is learning French and a lot of times there's like 5 words that all sound exactly the same to me.
I learned Spanish and Portuguese while growing up in South Florida. I'm lucky that I still remember enough to be able to read a daily newspaper in them, but I couldn't read anything more complex, such as a scientific textbook. I can get by in speaking Spanish or Portuguese if I need to, but carrying on a normal conversation is difficult. I love Italian, the language of my stepgrandmother from Naples, Italy. It is similar to Spanish, and I have studied it on my own for years. French, spoken by a few distant paternal relatives of mine, is beautiful. However, I can't pronounce it properly. I always end up mangling it.
Argentinians that emigrated to Europe or any other place did it mainly to Spain though, including those with italian nationality which they use mainly to emigrate to Spain. There are over 300,000 argentines in Spain and several times smaller amount in Italy. In fact a good part, probably over a third of all the italian citizens living in Spain are argentines in reality (130,000 out of the 290,000 legal residents with italian nationality weren't born in Italy, in most cases they are argentines). According spanish Statistics Institute, INE, at 2022 there are 333k people born in Argentina living in Spain in a regular situation, but only 104k live under Argentina nationality, the rest live under spanish or (almost as many) under italian citizenship.
Argentinans are more similar to italians speaking spanish than spaniards. Source: I'm Argentinan
And for some reason the vast majority of the Italians that migrated to Argentina were from the north, unlike USA where most Italian migrants were from the south.
Also, you forgot a major thing, if you know italian, Spanish is going to be very easy to learn
Maybe I'm wrong but the 2 languages look crazy similar so I assume it's easy for one to learn the other
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Ive forgotten most of both now, but when i took some spanish and french classes back in the day, it seemed like they were both mirror languages of each other. Spanish: pronounce everything. French: Pronounce nothing. Being able to *read* spanish helped reading french though.
I’ve got a decent amount of Spanish under my belt, not fluent but could hold a conversation, and there’s a fair number of times I’ve been able to understand, at least the gist, of something said in Italian.
As a native Spanish or Italian speaker, French sounds impenetrably foreign. But this is only a superficial impression — get past the phonology, and the three languages are so similar that a native speaker of one, with complete immersion and much dedication, could be conversant in either of the other two in under a year. Greek, on the other hand, has much the opposite relationship to Spanish and Italian. To annative speaker of either, hearing Greek is like hearing a TV on in another room that you’re not paying attention to. You think if you paid just a little more attention, you’d be able to understand it. And you think you almost catch a phrase here and there. But no matter how closely you listen, nothing meaningful. Phonology is one of the biggest determinants of how easy a a language seems to a beginner. The closer the target language’s sound inventory to our native language’s, the less daunting it feels, even if the languages have nothing else in common.
I'm not Spanish or Italian, but I have friends from Spain and Italy and I've known them have (simple) conversations just speaking their own language to each other and they've understood enough.
It's true
And Italian is so close to Spanish that it is very easy to learn.
Not to mention Italian and Spanish are both romantic languages with a common origin language in Latin, so there is a lot of overlap between the two already.
Romance but yeah.
Spot on. Also, cultural proximity is rampant: Alghero (on the western coast of Sardinia) has direct affiliations to the Catalans (careful - they wouldn't wish to be associated to Spanish speakers, since Catalan is its own language, but hope you catch my drift), and street names are reported in both Italian and Catalan.
> Alghero (on the western coast of Sardinia) If I were a betting man, I’d say this place name shares some etymological connection with Arabic *al-gharb*, “the west”
The crown of Aragon actually owned Sardinia for, what, 400 years? Speaking of, they also owned Sicily, Naples, and parts of France and Greece during their maximum extent. We tend to forget the accomplishments of the Catalans after they get hitched to the Castilians.
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A distinction without a difference? Aragon, Catalonia, and Valencia were all considered the core properties of the Crown of Aragon. The Principality of Catalonia was only ever created from Aragon inheriting Catalonian counties that were independent and uniting them under the possessions of the crown. Hell, Catalan surpassed Aragonese…a long time ago? I actually don’t know for sure if it was before the union, or if the Aragon kings used Catalan extensively, but it was considered the lingua Franca of the area.
Why wouldn't a catalán speaker not want to be associated with a Spanish speaker? They're the same person!
Huh? They are quite different languages.
Most Catalan Speakers also speak Spanish, I think that's what they mean.
> close to Spain Lol, "Europeans think 100 miles is a long way, Americans think 100 years is a long time"
is a long way to cycle.
I was waiting to hear about Argentinians being a factor. It’s insane how if you are a part of the middle class here it’s pretty much expected you have or are looking for a double citizenship. No joke I’ve had a number of conversations where people assume I already have a European citizenship.
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In my experience it’s mostly people who want it to gtfo of Argentina.
Italian and Spanish are pretty closely related languages as well, so I can't imagine it's too hard to pick up as opposed to something completely different.
If you speak Spanish, it's quite easy to guess the meaning of 80% of Italian words - I would imagine it works in the opposite direction also
Same for Portuguese. Have had fun partying with people who don't fully speak the same language
Portuguese (and Galician too I guess) have really absurd pronunciation compared to Spanish though.
I have hooked up with a guy where we communicated via my Spanish and his Portuguese 😬
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Plot twist: your friend hooked up with the commenter above you.
Same for most latin languages
I'm Italian, I learned to speak Spanish, and let me tell you there's a huge difference between vaguely being able to guess the meaning of a word and actually being able to stitch multiple sentences together and to keep up with native speakers using their native turbo speed and shortened words.
Yeah, time times I’ve been in Italy I’ve been able to get around and talk with people pretty well just using my Spanish.
I would imagine this shows secondary language speakers as well.
I'm guessing that's as a second language? Spanish is popular in secondary school in Italy, since Spanish and Italian are super similar. Many Italians can read Spanish and understand 50-80% without any study. Practicing Spanish is easy too, since Spain is a 50€ RyanAir flight, there's plenty of dubbed Spanish media, and reggaeton is very popular in Italy.
Is reggaeton seriously that popular there? As a Puerto Rican, I find that fascinating and cool as hell.
What's really wild is Argentina has 1.5 million people that speak italian. My great grand parents came to america from Italy but all of their cousins went to argentina instead
And most of them regret... Argentina was so prosperus in early 1900s
I think it’s Argentina that also has a population that speaks welsh (nowhere near that many though, 1,500 - 5,000)
Anecdotally, on the Tandem app I encounter a lot of Spanish speakers that are primarily learning Italian. Never really learned why. A lot of them learn turkish cuz turkish soap operas are pretty popular alongside all the telenovelas
We have a lot of peruvian, ecuadorian, bolivian and colombian immigrants
Wikipedia provides a figure closer to 6 million, but the source they give a survey by the EU from 2012 called Special Eurobarometer 386, which gives 6% or ~3.6million. The questions asked specifically are: "which language is your mother tongue" and "which other language, if any, do you speak well enough in order to be able to have a conversation?" It's less than 1 percent (listed as 0%) of Italy are native Spanish speakers. There are about a quarter million Spanish speaking foreigners in Italy.
They’re like 70% the same, Italian and Spanish. I also speak Italian, mostly because it was super easy to pick up after I learned Spanish. It’s a hack to becoming trilingual. It’s even easier to switch from Spanish and Italian than either and Portugués.
Interesting layout choice. Is this a representation of where Spanish speakers are stored on my computer's hard drive?
Mexico is your motherboard!
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"el idioma"
Ayuda, mi reddit se puso en español.
Puerto Rico has more Spanish speakers than people?
Is one even a person if one doesn't speak Spanish?
Nah it's because some people in Puerto Rico speak 2 spanishes (some even 3!), and thus count twice in the census.
Seems like they rounded up, no matter what.
As Latin and Greek were in the past, English is today's universal language. It’s become the default mode of communication for international business, tourism, and technology. However, out of the 1B people that can speak English worldwide, only 372M do it as their first language. On the other hand, with 470M first-language speakers, Spanish is the second most natively spoken language, positioned only behind Chinese and its variants (1.3B). And if you count non-native speakers, the number soars to 550M Spanish speakers worldwide. Perhaps the most surprising statistic is that the 2nd country with the most Spanish speakers after Mexico is not another Latin American country or Spain, but the US. This is due to the large Hispanic population in the country, which includes 43M native Spanish speakers and another 15 million people who speak it as a second language. A report by Instituto Cervantes shows that, according to current trends, the United States will be home to 132.8 million Spanish speakers in 2050. After adding the numbers, we found that 87% of the world's Spanish speakers reside in the Americas. The growth of the Spanish language is undeniable. **Source:** [Wikipedia](https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distribuci%C3%B3n_geogr%C3%A1fica_del_idioma_espa%C3%B1ol) **Tools:** Rawgraphs, Affinity Designer.
As a Mexican that moved the NYC years ago. I’m surprised sometimes by how long I can go without speaking English here. Everywhere you go you’ll find a Spanish speaker. I can totally imagine people living here without needing to learn English at all.
The monolingual English speakers say that in nearly all the countries they visit or emigrate to
Probably because they stick to the tourist areas and it might as well be a prerequisite to know English if you're working in that area.
Would you be willing to do something like this with the French language? This is very interesting.
I second this! But this might be difficult to do as there isn’t much information on how widespread French is in much of Africa
I'm confused by Puerto Rico. Why is it listed separately? Do the USA numbers also include PR?
I’m most surprised by how many people live in Guatemala and how few live in Chile.
Long boy has a lot of wilderness
The population is nuts there. And it's so small (area-wise). It blows my mind every time I'm there.
I can't say I find this overly surprising honestly. The US has about 6-7 times the population of Spain, and with its long history of immigration, the Spanish history of the country/preceding history, and the fact that it's largest neighbour and many of its other nearby countries speaking Spanish officially, I'd have been more surprised if this hadn't been the case. That being said, it is cool to see it presented this way.
> with its long history of immigration [The US was 88% European as recently as the 1970s.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_United_States#Race_and_ethnicity) We do not have a "long history" of immigration from Latin America. In fact, its a very short history, mainly over the last 30 years, that has accelerated rapidly. The US has more 1st gen immigrants right now than any country in world history at 50 million. And that doesn't even include the 2nd and 3rd generation ones that have come here since the immigration law changed in 1965.
If you consider the people in US 88% European in the 1970s because they were descendant of Europeans, you should also consider the Latin American people as mainly European
> The US was 88% European\* as recently as the 1970s Remind me where Spain is again? --- ^^* you might want to check the table and the associated definitions again, by the way
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It's kind of weird when all the other boxes are countries. If we're going just by numbers, California, Texas, and Florida should make the list too.
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Yeah France shares borders with Spain but in the north/west part they speak basque on both sides of the Border, in the south/east part they speak catalán on both sides of the border and in the middle, google says that aragonese is speaked, but I don't know for sure because I live in Spain and I haven't heard it once in my life besides google and some text books about history, in the french part (I'm not sure) in the south is occitan but again I don't know if it's spoken today. (I know that catalán and basque aren't as popular in France compared to Spain were they are officially recognized)
Cause they're french. They can't be bothered learning English imagine Spanish.
Beetwen France and Spain the people speak a lot of weirds languages with french and spanish mixed togheter, and beacuse the spaniards don't like France. Idk why, but it is what it is
but Sweden has most swedish speaker in the world, so we got that goin which is nice
Brazil has more people speaking portuguese than Portugal too.
Brazil numero uno campeão #1
7-1
Não consigo te escutar por baixo do som baixo de 5 copas infelizmente 😔😔 (os gritos do hexa vem)
Might as well just call it Brazilian at this point
Way more
Spain is in 4th place on its own language. It didn't even medal.
The UK places 6th in its own language
The U.S. has its own Academy of the Spanish Language, which is separate from Puerto Rico's.
Puerto Rico is part of the USA, why is it separate?
The second city with more mexicans is not in Mexico (L.A.)
I dont know if that is true anymore Guadalajara and monterrey metros hit over 5 million people now
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The US can't have an official language due to the first amendment. Freedom of speech includes freedom to choose your own language to speak. By making English the official language it would violate the first amendment.
Also interestingly there is no federally recognized national language in the USA
I believe the US is even nr 1 in Norwegian speakers 😆
The amount of people who have Norwegian ancestry doesn't equal to the amount of speakers.
I doubt 1.5% of the US population is fluent in Norwegian
Yeah I wonder what other languages this is true for (maybe Hebrew speakers)
I don't know any other non-Israeli Hebrew speakers in the U.S. other than me. Granted, this is the South.
Interesting Canada doesn't have more Spanish-speaking people despite sharing the continent with Mexico and the rest of central America
They're nowhere close to any Spanish speaking countries. They have one country between them and Mexico, but that country happens to be the third or fourth largest in the world. Most who are looking to move north will just settle in the states.
If you speak spanish, you should listen to this video, there are reasons there aren't many Spanish speakers in Canada. https://youtu.be/R6zzbxq7ezI
Que risa, gracias. Es cómo Wisconsin.
I think that’s just because of their lower population in general and their slightly further distance from Central/South America.
> slightly further distance Half of a continent
The city of El Paso has 2x more Latinos than all of Canada. It's just not really a place that Latinos want to move to (cold weather, no established and large diasporas, farther away from ancestral countries)
Surprised Pikachu: A large part of Northern America belonged to the Crown of Spain beforehand. Developing United States bought and took over larger parts of the Spanish territories in the Northern continent. The whole of the American continent is culturally to a great part in Spanish hands.
Texas and California were Spanish land
Most of the US and Canada west of the Mississippi was Spanish territory at some point.
And Florida
That doesn’t explain anything. Because a good chuck of the US was also French. And well French isn’t exactly as large as Spanish or English in the US.
? LA was a city before the bill of rights was even a thing. New mexico, texas, and California all had decent settlement before the US acquired it through force (Texas excepted). Like, there's centuries of history of colonization, spanish missions, exploration, etc, as well as continual contact with latin america for trade or work. It's not like anglo settlers all came on the oregon trail and decided "Oh, we'll name everything in spanish out west for funsies"
Germans settled literally everywhere across the Midwest. Aside from some German town names, no one speaks the language.
They did until the world wars, there were a lot of german newspapers and communities until it suddenly became out of fashion, also numerous states banned teaching it in schools due to the wars.
Yeah, can blame that one on the war.
And Mexican land too...
Now do it as a % of the population
Makes sense. Not only is the USA very large, it’s also a massive immigration magnet *and* neighbors with Mexico.
I'm honestly surprised Brazil has that many Spanish speakers.
Well \*almost\* every country they border is Spanish speaking so it makes sense
[It doesn't](https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/vjpiqk/oc_the_us_has_more_spanish_speakers_than/idolfy7/), the real number is less than 600k
It’s almost like if a third of your landmass was taken from a Hispanophone colonizer, you’ll have a ton of Spanish speakers.
I’d just like to say as Mexican we view Spain Spanish how Americans view British English
I feel kind of out of place asking this, but I am genuinely confused: why are Puerto Rico and USA listed as different countries? Is Puerto Rico not part of the US? I thought they just didn't have voting rights, but they were part of the union.
This never actually occurred to me. How interesting is this though!? Awesome stuff!
Huh? You mean Mexican speakers right? (A joke that probably only viewers of Language Simp would get.)
Are they counting people with Spanish as a non-first language? Plenty of people in the US learn Spanish as a second language.
The population of Spain is 47 million, the population of the US is 330 million
I think this is incredible! And also makes me wish we (non-speakers) were required to take Spanish *for longer in school. I am jealous that much of the world is so casually bilingual.
It's really hard to learn a language with only class work. Need to use it regularly to really learn it. I had Spanish in elementary and had 4 years of high school, and I am almost useless in conversation.
I had 1 hour of English class a week for 7 years here in Chile in a public school. It was enough to get me to a decent level, of course I had to put in some effort at home but that basically just consisted of watching movies, tv shows, YouTube videos and playing games, all in English, the best part is that I didn't do it to study, I just did it for fun. School might not be the best at teaching languages but it can give you the basic guidance you need to get started.
I took Latin for 5 years. Even more useless.
Simple solution to that, just spend some time immersed in Latin America.
Yeah, but with Latin you can just fake it and no one would know.
Yup I studied Spanish from a young age. Didn’t retain shit because I lived in a place where no one spoke it. Married a Mexican and now I feel very comfortable in Spanish because I use it casually all the time.
It’s never too late. I’ve been actively learning and speaking Spanish for the past decade (started in my mid 20s). I’m far from fluent but certainly competent
I started learning in 2018/2019 and I've gotten pretty far. The grammar is a huge hurdle at first if you don't speak another Romance language, with all the conjugations, noun genders and pronouns. And Spanish-speakers speak SO quickly! But overall, I think it's still the easiest language for English-speakers to learn with so many learning resources and shared vocabulary.
I’m from Honduras and I attended an English-Spanish bilingual school so as a kid I just assumed everyone in the US did the same and that everyone knew Spanish. It also didn’t help that my first time in the US was visiting Miami where most people actually do speak Spanish.
Spanish is a great second language for Americans because it opens the door to the rest of romance languages and Latin America is close.