1. Spanish is spoken by 500 million people, and trending toward 600 million by 2050.
2. It’s easy to learn. Written Spanish is almost completely phonetic—look at any word in this language and you can tell how it is pronounced. Basic grammar is straight forward and many vocabulary words are similar to English.
3. It is the official language of 22 countries and the second largest native language in the world. It is the second language used for international communication, and the third most used language on the Internet.
4.It is the second most studied language in the world. In 2010, the number of people studying Spanish as a second language was more than 20 million. In three generations, 10% of the world population will be able to communicate in Spanish.
5. This is the second most commonly spoken language in United States with 50 million people speaking it.
6. Mexico alone has 114 million speakers.
7. In 2005, the National Congress of Brazil passed a law making Spanish language teaching mandatory in both public and private secondary schools in Brazil.
8. There are more Spanish speaker in the United States than there are speakers of Chinese, French, Italian, Hawaiian and the Native American languages combined.
9. There have been 11 Nobel Prizes for Spanish Literature:
a. Jose Echegaray ( Spain, 1904)
b. Jacinto Benavente (Spain, 1922)
c. Gabriela Mistral (Chile, 1945)
d. Juan Ramon Jimenez (Spain, 1956)
e. Miguel Angel Asturias (Guatemala, 1967)
f. Pablo Neruda (Chile, 1971)
g. Vicente Aleixandre (Spain, 1977)
h. Gabriel Garcia Marquez (Colombia, 1982)
i. Camilo Jose Cela (Spain, 1989)
j. Octavio Paz (Mexico, 1990)
k. Mario Vargas Llosa (Peru, 2010)
l. Ruben Dario, the great Nicaraguan poet. He’s been praised as the “Prince of Castilian letters” and the undisputed father of the Modernismo Literacy movement.