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The challenges of Spanish Print E-mail

(October 1, 2007). - The Spanish language faces the challenge of becoming a language used in international communications if it can overcome its weaknesses: science and technology.

Despite the fact that it occupies third place in terms of the number of the world’s inhabitants who speak it (lagging only behind Mandarin Chinese and English), Spanish-language publications in the science and technology sphere represent only 0.5 percent of the total worldwide.

“And this number is threatening to shrink,” Victor García de la Concha, Director of the Real Academia Española (RAE), warned during a talk he gave as part of the 62nd General Assembly of the Interamerican Press Society held in Mexico City.

Professor García offered a series of statistics which gave proof of the magnitude of the challenge that the Spanish language faces in the coming years. He stated, for example, that Spanish is spoken by nearly 5.5% of the world’s population - a matter of significance if you take into account that 96% of the world’s languages are spoken by only 4% of humanity.

By 2050 - he added - the United States will be the number-one ranking country in terms of Spanish-speakers, and Brazil - faced with the dilemma of getting out of Spanish or getting out of the sea - has opted for the former. By 2030, 7.5% of the world’s population will be able to communicate in Spanish, while only 1.4% will be able to communicate in French, 2.2% in Russia, 4.6% in Arabic and 1.2% in German.

He said that there is no reason to be frightened by the words which the Spanish language has taken from other languages, and that what has to be done is to establish criteria.

José G. Moreno de Alba, Director of the Academia Mexicana de la Lengua, stated that there are many reasons to believe that Spanish is a major language. “It is the official language of more than twenty independent nations; it is one of the preferred languages for the study of a second language; it has one of the most widely recognized bodies of literature. In addition, it is a language which tends more toward unity than to diversity.”

Source: El Universal.
 
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