Spanish the Second Most Used Language on Twitter
January 18th, 2013
With its presence on the Internet growing more than 800% in the last 10 years, Spanish is now the second most used language on Twitter, after English.
This was announced by the director of the Cervantes Institute, Victor Garcia de la Concha, who, together with the Minister of Foreign Affairs, José Manuel García-Margallo, unveiled the Institute’s 2012 Yearbook, which looks at the presence of the Spanish language throughout the world.
With nearly 500 million speakers, Spanish (Castellano) is the second most-spoken language in the world, after Chinese, and for its advances in both its number of users and its frequency of use, it is ranked third on the Internet.
On Twitter Spanish stands ahead of Portuguese and Japanese, and quite a distance away from Arabic, Russian, Italian, French or German.
On Facebook, with 80 million users, Spanish also takes one of the top spots.
El Mundo reported that the potential growth of Spanish speaking users remains high as the average percentage of the population in Latin America using the Internet is up to now only 39.5%, far below the 71.5% of users in the EU and the 65.6% in Spain.
In addition to the growing presence of the Spanish language on the Internet, Garcia de la Concha highlighted the 8% annual increase in the number of enrollments to learn this language throughout the world, putting the number of students who have chosen Spanish as a foreign language at 18 million.
The Director of the Cervantes Institute stressed that, if the current growth rate continues, then within three or four generations, 10% of the world’s population will understand Spanish, and the United States will be the country with the highest volume of Spanish-speaking population.
Garcia de la Concha explained that the demand for the Spanish language is especially strong among young people, who understand that “it opens the way for them to practice their profession in the international arena”.
Related Posts
- English, Chinese and Spanish: Most Used Languages on the Internet
- Spanish Government Exceeds 200,000 Followers on Twitter
- Voting Begins for “Favourite Spanish Word”
Who is the author of this report?