News that US is now world’s second largest Spanish-speaking country belies the fact that America breeds English: ‘Spanish dominance, it’s not going to happen’

The news was striking and, to some, alarming: the United States is now the world’s second largest Spanish-speaking country after Mexico. It has 41 million native Spanish speakers and 11.6 million who are bilingual – more than Colombia or Spain – and is on course to be the biggest Spanish-speaking nation on Earth, with Spanish the mother tongue of almost a third of its citizens.

The study, published this week by Spain’s Instituto Cervantes, made global headlines and dismayed those in the US who fear linguistic pollution. “I thought we spoke ENGLISH here,” tweeted Scott Rogers, a Florida-based conservative blogger.

Coming on the heels of the Spanish-language network Univision dumping Donald Trump’s Miss USA pageant over his disparaging remarks about Mexican immigrants, it underlined a sense of surging Hispanic power.

Reality turns out to be a bit more complicado. Spanish is not becoming an all-conquering cultural force. It is not turning swaths of the US into Spanish-only realms. It may, in fact, eventually shrivel. More.

See: The Guardian

Related Translation News article:

• US now has more Spanish speakers than Spain – only Mexico has more

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