Spanish gains importance as “lingua Franca” in the public and economic life of the USA but its future growth will be related to immigration.

By 2060 the USA will be the second country after Mexico where Spanish is spoken.  If the projection keeps following the current trend, by that year there will be 119 million Spanish speakers in this country, which means one out of three people will speak the language. 

Without going that far in time, American Spanish, as some prefer to call it, is already the Lingua Franca in cities like New York, the city chosen by Instituto Cervantes to present their yearbook.  But as much as its predominance, Spanish is still a language discriminated against, and its future depends on the evolution of immigration.

The projections made by Instituto Cervantes are based on data from the Census Bureau. U.S. population is close to 328 million. 17.8% define themselves as Hispanics and among those, 71.6% say they speak Spanish at home. According to the yearbook data 41 million people are fluent in Spanish because is their mother tongue.

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