It's increasingly difficult to ignore the spread of Spanish in the United States. Bank ATMs offer instructions in Spanish. The Yellow Pages in many cities adds a Spanish-language insert. And Spanish is working its way into everyday use. From magazines to music, Spanish-language media have exploded. Radio stations more than doubled in the last decade, to 533. Broadcast TV stations jumped 70%, to 53, according to industry estimates. And those figures don't include cable and satellite or numerous outlets that devote only a portion of radio or TV programming to Spanish. .
The influence of English on American Spanish is very important. In many Latino (also called Hispanic) youth subcultures, it is fashionable to variously mix Spanish and English, thereby producing Spanglish. Spanglish is the name for the admixture of English words and phrases to Spanish for effective communication. The racial composition of non-Hispanic Spanish speakers mirrors that of the U.S. non-Hispanic population. Overall, three-quarters (77%) of non-Hispanics who speak Spanish at home are white, 14% are black, and 9% say they belong to some other racial group. Among the non-Hispanic U.S. population ages five years and older, 76% are white, 14% are black, and 9% are some other race. Three-in-ten (28%) non-Hispanics Spanish speakers who are married live with a Hispanic spouse. By comparison, only 2% of non-Hispanics are living with a Hispanic spouse. When it comes to English proficiency, eight-in-ten (80%) non-Hispanics who speak Spanish at home say they speak English "very well", 11% say they speak English "well", and 9% say they speak English "not well" or do not speak English. This compares with 96% of all non-Hispanics 5 years and older who speak English only or speak it "very well", 2% who speak English "well", and 2% who speak English "not well" or do not speak English.
