This paper explores articles about the Hispanic population through out the US. The research covers how americans relate to hispanics and their language in the USA, and how Spanish language is getting an increasing importance in the United States of America. It will overview the growth of the Spanish speakers in the country and explain the reason why there are so many non-Hispanics who also speak Spanish. We will also have a short glance into how this affects the education of Hispanic and native children. The main object of the research is to illustrate with numbers that Spanish has a brigth future in the USA.
Keywords: Hispanic, population, education, language.
Spanish in the USA.
Spanish is on the rise. The numbers might be surprising, but Spanish is the third among the more than 5.000 languages spoken in the world today. Only the languages of China and India are spoken by more native speakers. Even English take a back seat to Spanish with 330 million native speakers in the world, compared to 346 million for Spanish. The United States is the 5th largest Spanish-speaking country. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, out of the 60.6 million people who spoke a language other than English at home in 2011, almost two-thirds (37.6 million) spoke Spanish. This places the U.S. as the fifth largest Spanish-speaking country in the world –not the second one, as it is usually said- after Mexico (117 million), Spain (47.2 million), Colombia (47 million) and Argentina (41 million). However, not all Spanish speakers are Hispanic. According to our analysis, some 2.8 million non-Hispanics speak Spanish at home today. That places Spanish at the top of the list of non-English languages spoken by non-Hispanics along with Chinese and ahead of all other languages.
The number of Spanish speakers is 12.8 percent of the US population. This is no wonder if we take into consideration that Spanish is the second most used language in the United States, where it is also known as American Spanish, or Español americano.