The Cervantes Institute in New York, under the direction of Richard Bueno Hudson, held its third annual conference on May 10-11. Language and identity: speakers, tradition and culture. Two days of presentations and debates on the future of Spanish in the United States and its role in shaping Latin identity.
More than 62.5 million Americans are of Hispanic origin, representing 18.9% of the country’s total population. Among them, 67.6% use Spanish in their family environment. And this number is expected to increase significantly in the future. In its 2023 annual report, the Cervantes Institute estimates that in 2060, the United States will be the second country in the world with the highest number of Spanish speakers, after Mexico. As expected, that year there will be more than 111 million Hispanics in the United States. What is not so easy to predict is how many of them will continue to speak Spanish.
The abandonment of the mother tongue among third-generation speakers, a common phenomenon in many territories, is not as evident in the American case. Over the past thirty years, the proportion of Spanish-speaking Hispanics has slowly declined, by about ten percentage points. However, two issues could end up driving this language loss over generations: first, there are already more U.S.-born Hispanics than foreign-born Hispanics; and second, that 24% of Latin American adults say they do not speak Spanish or can only carry on a small conversation, according to a 2023 Pew Research Center study. Many speeches at the Cervantes Institute conference in New York have took place. this address. What can be done to maintain (and even encourage) the vitality of Spanish in the United States?
Language in Hispanic identity
To better understand the situation, we must look at other data related to Hispanic or Latin American identity. One is particularly telling: Most Hispanic Americans no longer consider knowledge of Spanish a prerequisite for identifying as Hispanic. 71% of Latino adults agreed with this statement in a 2016 Pew Research Center study. Among Latino immigrants, 58% supported this idea. And among U.S.-born Latinos, the percentages were even higher: 84% of second-generation Latinos and 92% of third-generation or higher Latinos said that speaking Spanish did not make someone Latino.
Another fundamental difference between U.S.-born and foreign-born Latinos is the language they choose to get their news. The former mainly prefer to follow the news in English, while the latter have much more varied consumption habits: 41% consume information mainly in Spanish, 26% in English and 31% in both languages equally (Pew Research Center, 2024).
The pressure on biculturalism is also essential in the configuration of identity. Second-, third-, or higher-generation Hispanics may prioritize English over Spanish for many reasons, from ease in the job market to social integration—nearly half of Hispanics not Spanish speakers surveyed in a 2022 study reported being bothered by other Hispanics. for not speaking Spanish. We also cannot forget the role of linguistic attrition (this progressive erosion of the mother tongue), a phenomenon which is beginning to be studied in more detail and which seems inevitable when there are languages in contact.
The Latino vote
For this projection of the Hispanic population in 2060, the United States Census Bureau carried out three demographic estimates, according to three different scenarios: high immigration, low or no immigration. The 111 million Hispanics would be affected if immigration policy did not change.
Shortly after Joe Biden was inaugurated as president, the White House press team opened a bureau for Hispanic media. There is also a Hispanic spokesperson and media director (Venezuelan María Carolina Casado) who is working on the campaign for the presidential elections in November this year. These decisions show an interest in the “Latino vote” and contrast with the previous administration, that of Donald Trump, where not only were there no Latinos occupying senior positions in the cabinet – as is the case in the Biden government – but The Spanish version of the White House website, created during the Barack Obama administration, was closed. It remains to be seen how many of the 36 million Latinos eligible to vote in November will ultimately do so. The National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials (NALEO) projects that there will be 17.5 million (11% of the total and 6.5% more than in 2020).
Teach Spanish
Spanish is by far the most studied language at all levels of education in the country. And the prospects here are clearly encouraging. Even though in the United States there is not a great interest in learning languages, as is the case in other English-speaking countries (only a fifth of North American students study a foreign language), the opportunities for expansion of Spanish in this area are numerous. very high, especially if we take into account the fact that it is already part of the teaching offer of a good part of the educational centers. If interest in language learning grows, one might expect that a good portion will turn to Spanish before other languages, as has happened so far (the number of students enrolled in Spanish courses triple that of students enrolled in courses in other languages). ).
Richard Bueno Hudson reminded Congress of a 2014 quote from Víctor García de la Concha, academic at the Royal Spanish Academy and former director of the Cervantes Institute: “The future of Spanish as a language of international communication – which is today already the second in the world western behind the English – has been played for several years in the United States. The fate of Spanish in this region will determine its consolidation as a language of international communication.
If this is the case, we will have to closely monitor what happens there in the years to come.
