Mexico is the country with the largest number of native Spanish speakers in the world. As of 2024, 132.5 million people in Mexico spoke Spanish with a native command of the language. Colombia was the nation with the second-highest number of native Spanish speakers, at around 52.7 million. Spain came in third, with 48 million, and Argentina fourth, with 46 million. Spanish, a world language As of 2023, Spanish ranked as the fourth most spoken language in the world, only behind English, Chinese, and Hindi, with over half a billion speakers. Spanish is the official language of over 20 countries, the majority on the American continent, nonetheless, it's also one of the official languages of Equatorial Guinea in Africa. Other countries have a strong influence, like the United States, Morocco, or Brazil, countries included in the list of non-Hispanic countries with the highest number of Spanish speakers. The second most spoken language in the U.S. In the most recent data, Spanish ranked as the language, other than English, with the highest number of speakers, with 12 times more speakers as the second place. Which comes to no surprise following the long history of migrations from Latin American countries to the Northern country. Moreover, only during the fiscal year 2022. 5 out of the top 10 countries of origin of naturalized people in the U.S. came from Spanish-speaking countries.

The United States is the non-hispanic country with the largest number of native Spanish speakers in the world, with approximately 41.89 million people with a native command of the language in 2024. However, the European Union had the largest group of non-native speakers with limited proficiency of Spanish, at around 28 million people. Furthermore, Mexico is the country with the largest number of native Spanish speakers in the world as of 2024.

In 2025, there were around 1.53 billion people worldwide who spoke English either natively or as a second language, slightly more than the 1.18 billion Mandarin Chinese speakers at the time of survey. Hindi and Spanish accounted for the third and fourth most widespread languages that year. Languages in the United States The United States does not have an official language, but the country uses English, specifically American English, for legislation, regulation, and other official pronouncements. The United States is a land of immigration, and the languages spoken in the United States vary as a result of the multicultural population. The second most common language spoken in the United States is Spanish or Spanish Creole, which over than 43 million people spoke at home in 2023. There were also 3.5 million Chinese speakers (including both Mandarin and Cantonese),1.8 million Tagalog speakers, and 1.57 million Vietnamese speakers counted in the United States that year. Different languages at home The percentage of people in the United States speaking a language other than English at home varies from state to state. The state with the highest percentage of population speaking a language other than English is California. About 45 percent of its population was speaking a language other than English at home in 2023.

ACS DEMOGRAPHIC AND HOUSING ESTIMATES HISPANIC OR LATINO AND RACE - DP05 Universe - Total population Survey-Program - American Community Survey 5-year estimates Years - 2020, 2021, 2022 The terms “Hispanic,” “Latino,” and “Spanish” are used interchangeably. Some respondents identify with all three terms while others may identify with only one of these three specific terms. People who identify with the terms “Hispanic,” “Latino,” or “Spanish” are those who classify themselves in one of the specific Hispanic, Latino, or Spanish categories listed on the questionnaire (“Mexican, Mexican Am., or Chicano,” “Puerto Rican,” or “Cuban”) as well as those who indicate that they are “another Hispanic, Latino, or Spanish origin.” People who do not identify with one of the specific origins listed on the questionnaire but indicate that they are “another Hispanic, Latino, or Spanish origin” are those whose origins are from Spain, the Spanish-speaking countries of Central or South America, or another Spanish culture or origin. Origin can be viewed as the heritage, nationality group, lineage, or country of birth of the person or the person’s parents or ancestors before their arrival in the UnitedStates. People who identify their origin as Hispanic, Latino, or Spanish may be of any race.

As of 2023, around 37.99 million people of Mexican descent were living in the United States - the largest of any Hispanic group. Puerto Ricans, Salvadorans, Cubans, and Dominicans rounded out the top five Hispanic groups living in the U.S. in that year.

In 2023, California had the highest Hispanic population in the United States, with over 15.76 million people claiming Hispanic heritage. Texas, Florida, New York, and Illinois rounded out the top five states for Hispanic residents in that year. History of Hispanic people Hispanic people are those whose heritage stems from a former Spanish colony. The Spanish Empire colonized most of Central and Latin America in the 15th century, which began when Christopher Columbus arrived in the Americas in 1492. The Spanish Empire expanded its territory throughout Central America and South America, but the colonization of the United States did not include the Northeastern part of the United States. Despite the number of Hispanic people living in the United States having increased, the median income of Hispanic households has fluctuated slightly since 1990. Hispanic population in the United States Hispanic people are the second-largest ethnic group in the United States, making Spanish the second most common language spoken in the country. In 2021, about one-fifth of Hispanic households in the United States made between 50,000 to 74,999 U.S. dollars. The unemployment rate of Hispanic Americans has fluctuated significantly since 1990, but has been on the decline since 2010, with the exception of 2020 and 2021, due to the impact of the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic.

People born in the ten most common non-English speaking background countries by SD, for the year 2011.

People born in the ten most common non-English speaking background countries by LGA 2011, for the 2011.

In 2023, it was estimated that approximately 664 million people lived in Latin America and the Caribbean. Brazil is the most populated country in the region, with an estimated 216.4 million inhabitants in that year, followed by Mexico with more than 128.5 million.

Multivariable logistic regression modeling: Ever tested for COVID-19.

This dataset, released in August 2017, contains the Australian residents population by their birthplace divided into English speaking (ES) and non-English speaking (NES) countries, 2016. The following countries are designated as ES: Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, South Africa, United Kingdom and the United States of America; the remaining countries are designated as NES. The dataset also includes the population of people born overseas and report poor proficiency in English. The data is by Local Government Area (LGA) 2016 geographic boundaries. For more information please see the data source notes on the data. Source: Compiled by PHIDU based on the ABS Census of Population and Housing, August 2016. AURIN has spatially enabled the original data. Data that was not shown/not applicable/not published/not available for the specific area ('#', '..', '^', 'np, 'n.a.', 'n.y.a.' in original PHIDU data) was removed.It has been replaced by by Blank cells. For other keys and abbreviations refer to PHIDU Keys.

Sample characteristics of the participants (N = 180).

The percentage of persons, out of the total number of persons living in an area, self-identifying their ethnicity as Hispanic or Latino. Hispanic origin can be viewed as the heritage, nationality group, lineage, or country of birth of the person or the person’s parents or ancestors before they arrived in the United States. People who identify their origin as Hispanic, Latino, or Spanish may be of any race. Source: U.S. Census Bureau, American Community SurveyYears Available: 2010, 2011-2015, 2012-2016, 2013-2017, 2014-2018, 2015-2019, 2020, 2017-2021, 2018-2022, 2019-2023Please note: We do not recommend comparing overlapping years of data due to the nature of this dataset. For more information, please visit: https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/acs/guidance/comparing-acs-data.html

The Catalan and Spanish languages coexist in the coastal region of Catalonia, both enjoying official and equal status. As of 2024, more than 48 percent of the population of Catalonia considered Spanish their mother tongue, whereas less than 40 percent reported being native speakers of Catalan. Catalonia was the second most populous autonomous community in Spain in 2024 with about eight million people. Editorial scene in Catalonia Despite the fact that the vast majority of books in Spain are published in Spanish, the Catalan language ranked second in the country’s editorial scene at about 9 percent of book publications, revealing the weight of this language among other languages spoken in Spain. In fact, Catalan was one of the most translated languages in this country according to the latest studies. Catalonia in Spain The Catalan participation in the Spanish GDP was estimated at 20 percent in 2023. This figure maintained steadily over the last few years, with an average share of about 20 percent of the total GDP of the country. The average GDP per capita in Catalonia was significantly higher than that of the rest of Spain at 34.534 euros in 2022. During the same period, Spain’s average GDP per capita was 28,276 euros.

Local ecological evidence is key to informing conservation. However, many global biodiversity indicators often neglect local ecological evidence published in languages other than English, potentially biassing our understanding of biodiversity trends in areas where English is not the dominant language. Brazil is a megadiverse country with a thriving national scientific publishing landscape. Here, using Brazil and a species abundance indicator as examples, we assess how well bilingual literature searches can both improve data coverage for a country where English is not the primary language and help tackle biases in biodiversity datasets. We conducted a comprehensive screening of articles containing abundance data for vertebrates published in 59 Brazilian journals (articles in Portuguese or English) and 79 international English-only journals. These were grouped into three datasets according to journal origin and article language (Brazilian-Portuguese, Brazilian-English and International). We analysed the taxonomic, spatial and temporal coverage of the datasets, compared their average abundance trends and investigated predictors of such trends with a modelling approach. Our results showed that including data published in Brazilian journals, especially those in Portuguese, strongly increased representation of Brazilian vertebrate species (by 10.1 times) and populations (by 7.6 times) in the dataset. Meanwhile, international journals featured a higher proportion of threatened species. There were no marked differences in spatial or temporal coverage between datasets, in spite of different bias towards infrastructures. Overall, while country-level trends in relative abundance did not substantially change with the addition of data from Brazilian journals, uncertainty considerably decreased. We found that population trends in international journals showed stronger and more frequent decreases in average abundance than those in national journals, regardless of whether the latter were published in Portuguese or English. Policy implications. Collecting data from local sources markedly further strengthens global biodiversity databases by adding species not previously included in international datasets. Furthermore, the addition of these data helps to understand spatial and temporal biases that potentially influence abundance trends at both national and global level. We show how incorporating non-English-language studies in global databases and indicators could provide a more complete understanding of biodiversity trends and therefore better inform global conservation policy. Methods Data collection We collected time-series of vertebrate population abundance suitable for entry into the LPD (livingplanetindex.org), which provides the repository for one of the indicators in the GBF, the Living Planet Index (LPI, Ledger et al., 2023). Despite the continuous addition of new data, LPI coverage remains incomplete for some regions (Living Planet Report 2024 – A System in Peril, 2024). We collected data from three sets of sources: a) Portuguese-language articles from Brazilian journals (hereafter “Brazilian-Portuguese” dataset), b) English-language articles from Brazilian journals (“Brazilian-English” dataset) and c) English-language articles from non-Brazilian journals (“International” dataset). For a) and b), we first compiled a list of Brazilian biodiversity-related journals using the list of non-English-language journals in ecology and conservation published by the translatE project (www.translatesciences.com) as a starting point. The International dataset was obtained from the LPD team and sourced from the 78 journals they routinely monitor as part of their ongoing data searches. We excluded journals whose scope was not relevant to our work (e.g. those focusing on agroforestry or crop science), and taxon-specific journals (e.g. South American Journal of Herpetology) since they could introduce taxonomic bias to the data collection process. We considered only articles published between 1990 and 2015, and thus further excluded journals that published articles exclusively outside of this timeframe. We chose this period because of higher data availability (Deinet et al., 2024), since less monitoring took place in earlier decades, and data availability for the last decade is also not as high as there is a lag between data being collected and trends becoming available in the literature. Finally, we excluded any journals that had inactive links or that were no longer available online. While we acknowledge that biodiversity data are available from a wider range of sources (grey literature, online databases, university theses etc.), here we limited our searches to peer-reviewed journals and articles published within a specific timeframe to standardise data collection and allow for comparison between datasets. We screened a total of 59 Brazilian journals; of these, nine accept articles only in English, 13 only in Portuguese and 37 in both languages. We systematically checked all articles of all issues published between 1990 and 2015. Articles that appeared to contain abundance data for vertebrate species based on title and/or abstract were further evaluated by reading the material and methods section. For an article to be included in our dataset, we followed the criteria applied for inclusion into the LPD (livingplanetindex.org/about_index#data): a) data must have been collected using comparable methods for at least two years for the same population, and b) units must be of population size, either a direct measure such as population counts or densities, or indices, or a reliable proxy such as breeding pairs, capture per unit effort or measures of biomass for a single species (e.g. fish data are often available in one of the latter two formats). Assessing search effectiveness and dataset representation We calculated the encounter rate of relevant articles (i.e. those that satisfied the criteria for inclusion in our datasets) for each journal as the proportion of such articles relative to the total number of articles screened for that journal. We assessed the taxonomic representation of each dataset by calculating the percentage of species of each vertebrate group (all fishes combined, amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals) with relevant abundance data in relation to the number of species of these groups known to occur in Brazil. The total number of known species for each taxon was compiled from national-level sources (amphibians, Segalla et al. 2021; birds, (Pacheco et al., 2021); mammals, Abreu et al. 2022; reptiles, Costa, Guedes and Bérnils, 2022) or through online databases (Fishbase, Froese and Pauly, 2024). We calculated accumulation curves using 1,000 permutations and applying the rarefaction method, using the vegan package (Jari Oksanen et al., 2024). These represent the cumulative number of new species added with each article containing relevant data, allowing us to assess how additional data collection could increase coverage of abundance data across datasets. To compare species threat status among datasets, we used the category for each species available in the Brazilian (‘Sistema de Avaliação do Risco de Extinção da Biodiversidade – SALVE’, 2024) and IUCN Red List (IUCN, 2024), and calculated the percentage of species in each category per dataset. To assess and compare the temporal coverage of the different datasets, we calculated the number of populations and species across time. To assess geographic gaps, we mapped the locations of each population using QGIS version 3.6 (QGIS Development Team, 2019). We then quantified the bias of terrestrial records towards proximity to infrastructures (airports, cities, roads and waterbodies) at a 0.5º resolution (circa 55.5 km x 55.5 km at the equator) and a 2º buffer using posterior weights from the R package sampbias (Zizka, Antonelli and Silvestro, 2021). Higher posterior weights indicate stronger bias effect. Generalised linear mixed models and population abundance trends We used the rlpi R package (Freeman et al., 2017) to calculate trends in relative abundance. We calculated the average lambda (logged annual rate of change) for each time-series by averaging the lambda values across all years between the start and the end year of the time-series. We then built generalised linear mixed models (GLMM) to test how average lambdas changed across language (Portuguese vs English), journal origin (national vs international), and taxonomic group, using location, journal name, and species as random intercepts (Table 1). We offset these by the number of sampled years to adjust summed lambda to a standardised measure, to allow comparison across different observations with different length of time series and plotted the beta coefficients (effect sizes) of all factors. Finally, we performed a post-hoc test to check pairwise differences between taxonomic groups (Table S2). To assess the influence of national-level data on global trends in relative abundance, we calculated the trends for both the International dataset and the two combined Brazilian datasets (Brazilian-Portuguese and Brazilian-English), using only years for which data were available for more than one species, to be able to estimate trend variation. We also plotted the trends for the Brazilian datasets separately. All analyses were performed in R 4.4.1 (R Core Team, 2024).

NOTE: For information on confidentiality protection, nonsampling error, and definitions, see https://www2.census.gov/programs-surveys/decennial/rdo/technical-documentation/CD115_TechnicalDocumentation.pdf..Source: U.S. Census Bureau, 2010 Census..X Not applicable. .[1] Other Asian alone, or two or more Asian categories. .[2] Other Pacific Islander alone, or two or more Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islander categories. .[3] One of the four most commonly reported multiple-race combinations nationwide in Census 2000. .[4] In combination with one or more of the other races listed. The six numbers may add to more than the total population, and the six percentages may add to more than 100 percent because individuals may report more than one race. .[5] This category is composed of people whose origins are from the Dominican Republic, Spain, and Spanish-speaking Central or South American countries. It also includes general origin responses such as "Latino" or "Hispanic." .[6] "Spouse" represents spouse of the householder. It does not reflect all spouses in a household. Responses of "same-sex spouse" were edited during processing to "unmarried partner." .[7] "Family households" consist of a householder and one or more other people related to the householder by birth, marriage, or adoption. They do not include same-sex married couples even if the marriage was performed in a state issuing marriage certificates for same-sex couples. Same-sex couple households are included in the family households category if there is at least one additional person related to the householder by birth or adoption. Same-sex couple households with no relatives of the householder present are tabulated in nonfamily households. "Nonfamily households" consist of people living alone and households which do not have any members related to the householder. .[8] The homeowner vacancy rate is the proportion of the homeowner inventory that is vacant "for sale." It is computed by dividing the total number of vacant units "for sale only" by the sum of owner-occupied units, vacant units that are "for sale only," and vacant units that have been sold but not yet occupied; and then multiplying by 100. .[9] The rental vacancy rate is the proportion of the rental inventory that is vacant "for rent." It is computed by dividing the total number of vacant units "for rent" by the sum of the renter-occupied units, vacant units that are "for rent," and vacant units that have been rented but not yet occupied; and then multiplying by 100. . Source: U.S. Census Bureau, Congressional District Summary File (115th Congress), Tables P5, P6, P8, P12, P13, P17, P19, P20, P25, P29, P31, P34, P37, P43, PCT5, PCT8, PCT11, PCT12, PCT19, PCT23, PCT24, H3, H4, H5, H11, H12, and H16.

In 2023, around 43.37 million people in the United States spoke Spanish at home. In comparison, approximately 998,179 people were speaking Russian at home during the same year. The distribution of the U.S. population by ethnicity can be accessed here. A ranking of the most spoken languages across the world can be accessed here.

In 2024, the total population of Spain was around 48.38 million people. By 2029, it was forecast to grow up to 50.76 million inhabitants.

Population of Spain While Spain’s fertility rate has been relatively decreasing over the past decade, its year-over-year population growth has been increasing continuously since 2016. The collapse of the job and real estate markets may have led the Spanish to postpone having (more) kids or to migrate to other countries in search of a more stable economy, while inflow of migrates has increased . This theory is supported by data on the average age of Spain’s inhabitants; a look at the median age of Spain’s population from 1950 up until today shows that the Spanish get older on average – perhaps due to the aforementioned factors.

Economic recovery Speaking of Spain’s economy, economic key factors suggest that the country is still recovering from the crisis. Its gross domestic product (GDP) was in admirable shape prior to the collapse, but it still has not returned to its former glory. Only recently has Spain reported actual GDP growth since 2008. Nevertheless, during 2020 and the COVID-19 pandemic, Spain's GDP had a decrease of more than 11 percent. This in turn, led to an increase of the country’s unemployment rate after years of slowly but surely decreasing following an alarming peak of 26 percent in 2013. Future perspectives are, however, somewhat brighter, as GDP is forecast to maintain a positive growth rate at least until 2029, even exceeding two percentage points in 2025.

In 2022, around 48.59 percent of New Mexico's population was of Hispanic origin, compared to the national percentage of 19.45. California, Texas, and Arizona also registered shares over 30 percent. The distribution of the U.S. population by ethnicity can be accessed here.

In 2020, about 93.8 percent of the Mexican population was monolingual in Spanish. Around five percent spoke a combination of Spanish and indigenous languages. Spanish is the third-most spoken native language worldwide, after Mandarin Chinese and Hindi.

Mexican Spanish

Spanish was first being used in Mexico in the 16th century, at the time of Spanish colonization during the Conquest campaigns of what is now Mexico and the Caribbean. As of 2018, Mexico is the country with the largest number of native Spanish speakers worldwide. Mexican Spanish is influenced by English and Nahuatl, and has about 120 million users. The Mexican government uses Spanish in the majority of its proceedings, however it recognizes 68 national languages, 63 of which are indigenous.

Indigenous languages spoken

Of the indigenous languages spoken, two of the most widely used are Nahuatl and Maya. Due to a history of marginalization of indigenous groups, most indigenous languages are endangered, and many linguists warn they might cease to be used after a span of just a few decades. In recent years, legislative attempts such as the San Andréas Accords have been made to protect indigenous groups, who make up about 25 million of Mexico’s 125 million total inhabitants, though the efficacy of such measures is yet to be seen.