[LINK] "U.S. now the world’s second-largest Spanish-speaking nation"

[rfmcdonald]

Dylan Baddour blogging for the Houston Chronicle notes that the United States now has more speakers of Spanish than every other country save Mexico.

The United States boasts the world’s second-largest Spanish-speaking population, now that this country’s Hispanic population outnumbers the entire populace of Spain.

Only Mexico has more Spanish-speakers than the U.S., but even that is expected to change by 2050, when the United States will likely be the world’s largest Spanish-speaking country, according to a new report on the Spanish language by the Cervantes Institute in Spain.

The 77-page report dedicates one of seven chapters to U.S. Spanish language , tracking momentous growth in the scope and presence of Uncle Sam’s Hispanic population in recent decades.

“More than half of the growth of the U.S. population between 2000 and 2010 resulted from the growth of the Hispanic community,” the report said, citing numbers from the U.S. Census Bureau.

In the first decade of the second millennium the U.S. population grew by 27.3 million, and 15.2 million of those people are Spanish-speakers. The Hispanic population grew by 43 percent while the entire nation grew by 9.7 percent. The report attributes that discrepancy to both Hispanics’ higher reproductive rates and the steady influx of Spanish-speaking immigrants to the United States.