Spanish is the second most spoken language in the United States, after English. Approximately 45 million people aged five or older speak Spanish at home, representing about 14% of the U.S. population. Broader estimates place the total number of Spanish speakers—including native speakers, heritage speakers, and second-language speakers—at around 59 million, or roughly 18% of the population.Instituto Cervantes' Yearbook 2023. 15.5 million Spanish speakers as a second language or limited competence, and 8 million students. (PDF). Retrieved on 20231 (Spanish)Romero, Simon., Spanish Thrives in the U.S. Despite an English-Only Drive, New York Times, 23 August 2017. Retrieved 17 July 2022. The North American Academy of the Spanish Language (Academia Norteamericana de la Lengua Española) serves as the official institution dedicated to the promotion and regulation of the Spanish language in the United States.
In the United States, the number of Hispanophones exceeds the combined total of speakers of French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Hawaiian, the Indo-Aryan languages, the various varieties of Chinese, Arabic and the Native American languages. The U.S. also has the second-largest Spanish-speaking population in the world, after Mexico. According to the 2024 American Community Survey conducted by the U.S. Census Bureau, 44.9 million people aged five or older speak Spanish at home — more than twice as many as in 1990. Spanish is also the most studied language in the United States after English, with approximately 8 million students enrolled in Spanish courses at various educational levels. The use and importance of Spanish in the United States has increased significantly as Hispanics are one of the fastest-growing ethnic groups in the country. While the proportion of Hispanics who use Spanish in major urban areas has declined, the absolute number of Spanish speakers nationwide, as well as the use of Spanish at home, continues to grow annually.
Spanish has been spoken in what is now the United States since the 15th century, with the arrival of Spanish colonization in North America. Colonizers settled in areas that would later become Florida, Texas, Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, and California as well as in what is now the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico. The Spanish explorers explored areas of 42 of the future US states leaving behind a varying range of Hispanic legacy in North America. Western regions of the Louisiana Territory were also under Spanish rule between 1763 and 1800, after the French and Indian War, which further extended Spanish influences throughout what is now the United States. These areas were incorporated into the United States in the first half of the 19th century, and the first constitutions of the states of California and New Mexico were written in both Spanish and English. Spanish was later reinforced in the country by the acquisition of Puerto Rico in 1898. Despite the rise of the English-only movement, Hispanophone publications resisted the acculturation to Anglo-Saxon culture and the English language, and waves of immigration from Mexico, Cuba, Venezuela, El Salvador, and elsewhere in Hispanic America have strengthened the prominence of Spanish in the country to the present day.
History
Early Spanish settlements The Spanish arrived in what would later become the United States in 1493, with the Spanish arrival to Puerto Rico. Ponce de León explored Florida in 1513. In 1565, the Spaniards founded St. Augustine, Florida. The Spanish later left but others moved in and it is the oldest continuously occupied European settlement in the continental United States. Juan Ponce de León founded San Juan, Puerto Rico, in 1508. Historically, the Spanish-speaking population increased because of territorial annexation of lands claimed earlier by the Spanish Empire and by wars with Mexico and by land purchases.David J. Weber, Spanish Frontier in North America (Yale UP, 1992) ch 1-5.
Spanish Louisiana
During the late 18th and early 19th centuries, land claimed by Spain encompassed a large part of the contemporary U.S. territory, including the French colony of Louisiana from 1769 to 1800. In order to further establish and defend Louisiana, Spanish Governor Bernardo de Gálvez recruited Canary Islanders to emigrate to North America. Between November 1778 and July 1779, around 1600 Isleños arrived in New Orleans, and another group of about 300 came in 1783. By 1780, the four Isleño communities were already founded. When Louisiana was sold to the United States, its Spanish, Creole and Cajun inhabitants became U.S. citizens, and continued to speak Spanish or French. In 1813, George Ticknor started a program of Spanish Studies at Harvard University. Spain also founded settlements along the Sabine River, to protect the border with French Louisiana. The towns of Nacogdoches, Texas and Los Adaes were founded as part of this settlement, and the people there spoke a dialect descended from rural Mexican Spanish, which is now almost completely extinct. Although it's commonly thought in Nacogdoches that the Hispanic residents of the Sabine River area are ,, cited in their Spanish dialect is derived from rural Mexican Spanish, and their ancestors came from Mexico and other parts of Texas.
Annexation of Texas and the Mexican–American War
In 1821, after Mexico's War of Independence from Spain, Texas was part of the United Mexican States as the state of Coahuila y Tejas. A large influx of Americans soon followed, originally with the approval of Mexico's president. In 1836, the now largely "American" Texans fought a war of independence from the central government of Mexico. The arrivals from the US objected to Mexico's abolition of slavery. They declared independence and established the Republic of Texas. In 1846, the Republic dissolved when Texas entered the United States of America as a state. By 1850, fewer than 16,000 or 7.5% of Texans were of Mexican descent, Spanish-speaking people (both Mexicans and non-Spanish European settlers, including German Texans) were outnumbered six to one by English-speaking settlers (both Americans and other immigrant Europeans).
After the Mexican War of Independence from Spain, California, Nevada, Arizona, Utah, western Colorado and southwestern Wyoming also became part of the Mexican territory of Alta California. Most of New Mexico, western Texas, southern Colorado, southwestern Kansas, and the Oklahoma panhandle were part of the territory of Santa Fe de Nuevo México. The geographical isolation and unique political history of this territory led to New Mexican Spanish differing notably from both Spanish spoken in other parts of the United States of America and Spanish spoken in the present-day United Mexican States.
Mexico lost almost half of the northern territory gained from Spain in 1821 to the United States in the Mexican–American War (1846–1848). This included parts of contemporary Texas, and Colorado, Arizona, New Mexico, Wyoming, California, Nevada, and Utah. Although the lost territory was sparsely populated, the thousands of Spanish-speaking Mexicans subsequently became U.S. citizens.
The war-ending Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848) does not explicitly address language. Although Spanish initially continued to be used in schools and government, the English-speaking American settlers who entered the Southwest established their language, culture, and law as dominant, displacing Spanish in the public sphere.
The California experience is illustrative. The first California constitutional convention in 1849 had eight Californio participants; the resulting state constitution was produced in English and Spanish, and it contained a clause requiring all published laws and regulations to be published in both languages.Guadalupe Valdés et al., Developing Minority Language Resources: The Case of Spanish in California (Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters, 2006), 28–29. One of the first acts of the first California Legislature of 1850 was to authorize the appointment of a State Translator, who would be responsible for translating all state laws, decrees, documents, or orders into Spanish.
Such magnanimity did not last very long. As early as February 1850, California adopted the Anglo-American common law as the basis of the new state's legal system. In 1855, California declared that English would be the only medium of instruction in its schools. These policies were one way of ensuring the social and political dominance of Anglos.
The state's second constitutional convention in 1872 had no Spanish-speaking participants; the convention's English-speaking participants felt that the state's remaining minority of Spanish-speakers should simply learn English; and the convention ultimately voted 46–39 to revise the earlier clause so that all official proceedings would henceforth be published only in English.
Despite the displacement of Spanish from the public sphere, much of the border region, including most of Southern California, Arizona, New Mexico, and south Texas, was home to Spanish speaking communities until at least the beginning of the 20th century.
Spanish–American War (1898)
In 1898, consequent to the Spanish–American War, the United States took control of Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines as U.S. overseas territories. In 1902, Cuba became independent from the United States, while Puerto Rico remained a U.S. territory. The U.S. government required government services to be bilingual in Spanish and English, and attempted to introduce English-medium education to Puerto Rico, but the latter effort was unsuccessful.
Once Puerto Rico was granted autonomy in 1948, even mainlander officials who came to Puerto Rico were forced to learn Spanish. Only 20% of Puerto Rico's residents understand English, and although the island's government had a policy of official bilingualism, it was repealed in favor of a Spanish-only policy in 1991. This policy was reversed in 1993 when a pro-statehood party ousted a pro-independence party from the commonwealth government.
Spanish disappeared in several countries and US territories during the 20th century, notably in the Philippines and in the Pacific Island countries of Guam, Micronesia, Palau, the Northern Marianas islands, and the Marshall Islands.
Hispanics as the largest minority in the United States The relatively recent but large influx of Spanish-speakers to the United States has increased the overall total of Spanish-speakers in the country. They form majorities and large minorities in many political districts, especially in California, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas (the U.S. states bordering Mexico), and also in South Florida.
Mexicans first moved to the United States as refugees in the turmoil of the Mexican Revolution from 1910 to 1917, but many more emigrated later for economic reasons. The large majority of Mexicans are in the former Mexican-controlled areas in the Southwest. From 1942 to 1962, the Bracero program would provide for mass Mexican migration to the United States.
At over 5 million, Puerto Ricans are the second largest Spanish-speaking ethnicity. They are the least likely to be proficient in Spanish, but millions of Puerto Rican Americans living in the U.S. mainland are fluent in Spanish. Puerto Ricans are natural-born U.S. citizens, and many Puerto Ricans have migrated to New York City, Orlando, Philadelphia, and other areas of the Eastern United States, increasing the Spanish-speaking populations and in some areas being the majority of the Hispanophone population, especially in Central Florida. In Hawaii, where Puerto Rican farm laborers and Mexican ranchers have settled since the late 19th century, seven percent of the islands' people are either Hispanic or Hispanophone or both.