New Project Touts Spanish as a Second Language, Worldwide

By Adriana Lopez -- Críticas, 11/15/2006

Madrid’s most influential forces in the Spanish literary world united for a press conference in October to announce the launch of a reference book about the presence of the Spanish language in the world. Enciclopedia del español en el mundo (“The Encyclopedia of Spanish Worldwide,” Plaza & Janés) is a joint publishing venture between Random House Mondadori, Spain’s book club Círculo de Lectores, and the home chapter of the Instituto Cervantes (Cervantes Institute). It’s the first of future volumes to come that will explore how the Spanish language is being learned and spoken worldwide. A U.S. distribution date has not yet been established.

While this dense book of 900 color pages—with essays, photos, charts, and graphs citing countries and cities where there are currently students of Spanish and why—is intended for use in institutions, it contains an important general message. Spanish is currently the most studied language worldwide (behind English) with 14 million students around the globe. The United States currently has almost half of those students, with an estimated six million studying the language. This statistic, according to the Enciclopeida’s studies, is expected to triple in the next few years.

Eduardo Lago, Director of the Instituto Cervantes’s New York center, thinks this project contextualizes Spanish as a second language in a global frame. “It provides a broad overview on the situation of Spanish and allows anyone interested to have a sense of the importance of the language in the world of today and of tomorrow,” he said.

The launch of Enciclopedia del español en el mundo also commemorated the Instituto Cervantes’s 15^th anniversary. Spain’s King himself, Don Juan Carlos I, dedicated a few lines in the opening pages of the encyclopedia in commemoration of the Instituto’s inauguration in Sevilla on October 10, 1992. And according to Instituto Cervantes’ Director César Antonio Molina, the Spanish language is in its “best age of diversity.”