Santiago, Apr 3, 2009 (EFE via COMTEX) — If not for the discovery of America, Spanish today would be just another European language ranking 27th worldwide in terms of number of speakers, just ahead of Ukrainian, according to the director of the Chilean Academy of Language.
“But in addition to the huge number of speakers (in the) Americas, (the Spanish language’s cultural influence) is rising as a force,” Alfredo Matus said Friday during the presentation of the first two volumes of the study “El Valor Economico del Español: una empresa multinacional” (The Economic Value of Spanish: A Multinational Enterprise).
Matus referred to the 5th International Congress of the Spanish Language, which will be held in the Chilean port city of Valparaiso next March to coincide with bicentennial independence celebrations in Chile and several other Latin American countries and will have the slogan “The Americas in the Spanish Language.” “This is not just another congress about Spanish in the Americas.
There’s a 180-degree shift: the Americas in the Spanish language,” said Matus, who noted that in his study he maintains that “Spanish is a language of the Americas and it is here where it’s future is being played out.” The study was presented at the Americas hall of Chile’s National Library in a ceremony also attended by that institution’s director, Ana Tironi; and the president of the Chilean subsidiary of Spanish telecommunications giant Telefonica, Emilio Gilolmo.
The three-volume project is sponsored by the Telefonica Foundation in collaboration with the Spanish government’s Cervantes Institute and the Elcano Royal Institute for International and Strategic Studies, a private Spanish foundation.
The first two books of the study – “Atlas of the Spanish Language in the World” and “Economics of Spanish: An Introduction” – reflect Spanish’s status as the world’s No. 2 language in terms of international communication over the next decade and one that could surpass English in terms of number of speakers.
The study notes that a total of roughly 438 million people speak Spanish worldwide, including native speakers and those who use the language with varying degrees of competency as a second language.
Over the past eight years, the number of people who speak Spanish has grown by 9.8 percent, the second-largest increase – after Arabic – among the six official languages of the United Nations.
The study predicts that Spanish will continue to be one of the five most widely spoken languages in the world in 2050. EFE mf/mc
Source: http://www.tmcnet.com/usubmit/2009/04/03/4105561.htm
