Spanish grows by 10 million speakers in one year, 1.5% more, with a 12% increase in enrollment in China

Spanish speakers have grown by 10 million in 2026, 1.5% more than the previous year, reaching 640 million people with some command of this language. These data come from the yearbook ‘Spanish in the world 2026’, which the Cervantes Institute has just published with updated data on the state of the language.

This report, presented at the Instituto Cervantes in Beijing this Saturday, October 24, within the framework of the symposium ‘Spanish in China: evolution and new dynamics’ on the occasion of the center’s 20th anniversary, also highlights the increase in the relevance of Spanish as a migratory language, with one in ten native speakers residing in non-Spanish-speaking countries.

Likewise, to commemorate this anniversary, the second section of the yearbook is made up of a series of articles that analyze different aspects of the situation of Spanish in China, with attention to the evolution, configuration and projection of the studies and teaching of the language in this country.

China has nearly 98,000 potential Spanish speakers (with 18,497 people with native proficiency and a group of 66,051 learners of the language as a foreign language), with constant growth in enrollment in recent years.

In fact, according to data collected by the Global Spanish Observatory, the number of enrollments of philology students, electives and ELE courses in China has increased by 12.6% in the period from 2023 to 2025. Spanish programs are offered in 31 cities and practically all universities, 98%, offer Hispanic philology studies.

The director of Cervantes, Luis García Montero, presented these figures at the event, accompanied by the Academic Director of the institution, Álvaro García Santa-Cecilia; the director of the Global Observatory of Spanish, Francisco Moreno Fernández, and the professor of Spanish language and vice dean of the Shanghai International Studies University (SISU), Yang Ming.

Subsequently, the colloquium ‘Spanish in China’ was held with the participation of the director of the Cervantes Institute in Beijing, Inmaculada González Puy and Lu Jingsheng, a Hispanicist from the Shanghai International Studies University (SISU).

The book includes updated data on the Spanish language, collected in the report ‘Spanish: language for the world 2026’. This 27th edition also contains several analyzes on the weight of the Spanish-speaking community in fields such as machine translation, Spanish in Europe and the digital press.

520 MILLION NATIVE SPANISH SPEAKERS

Among the highlighted data of the report, it is highlighted that the community with native command of the Spanish language exceeds 520 million and speakers with limited skills exceed 95 million, which in the latter case represents a total increase of 3.3% compared to the 2025 report.

Along these lines, the community of native-dominant Spanish speakers continues to be the third largest in the world, behind the communities of native speakers of Mandarin Chinese and Hindi. The report highlights that, in Spanish-speaking countries, native Spanish speakers number around 460 million and speakers with limited competence or skills exceed 20 million.

The number of potential Spanish speakers outside Hispanic countries exceeds 137 million, excluding learners and, outside of the countries where it is an official, national, general or vehicular language, the United States is the country where the most potential Spanish speakers gather (with a predominance of the native domain).

The yearbook also reflects that the European Union as a whole is the place of residence for nearly 50 million potential Spanish speakers, while the volume of the population speaking minority Hispanic varieties – creole, contact or decadent varieties – does not exceed a total of one million people, barely 0.2% of the total Spanish-speaking population.

The volume of Spanish learners exceeds 24 million, concentrated, by continent, in America, Europe and Africa, registering growth in the last two years of 7%, with the exception of Brazil. Precisely, in this South American country, educational legislation is producing a drastic change in the offer of Spanish in public schools and the number of learners decreased by 46% between 2021 and 2025.

On the contrary, Africa is experiencing appreciable growth in the Spanish-speaking community, driven largely by the interest in learning Spanish in formal education, especially in countries such as Cameroon, Ivory Coast or Benin in sub-Saharan Africa, and Morocco or Tunisia in the Maghreb.

72 MILLION USERS ON DUOLINGO

This edition shows that the number of Duolingo users who choose Spanish for their learning exceeds 72 million; of them, two-thirds have English as their native language.

In the Hispanic space, reading books in digital format has a greater penetration in Spain (31.7%), Mexico (21%) and Argentina (20%). Of these percentages, audiobook users do not reach 10%, although it is a proportion with a growing trend.

The percentage of web pages with content in Spanish is the second highest in the world, although far from the number of pages in English. Latin America concentrates 14% of global visits to AI solutions, above its relative weight in internet users (11%); Thus, there is growing consumption that coexists with infrastructure gaps.

The impact of AI, both in Spain and Latin America, is reconfiguring the cycle of production and access to information in Spanish: where there is a critical mass of users and companies, Spanish gains presence in virtual assistants.

This yearbook has been presented within the framework of the celebration, from October 23 to 25, of the first twenty years of the Cervantes Institute center in the Chinese capital, with the symposium ‘Spanish in China: evolution and dynamics’, in which the balance and reflection on the evolution of the Spanish language in the Asian country during these two decades will be taken.

On the eve of the opening of the symposium, a panel discussion was held within the framework of the exhibition ‘Truths and Lies. The power of fiction’, organized by the Instituto Cervantes and Prodigioso Volcán. Jordi Gracia, writer, essayist and journalist, participated in it; María Moya, co-founder of Prodigioso Volcán and curator of the exhibition; Lorena Cantó, chief correspondent of the EFE Agency in China; Dong Bingfeng, art critic and curator of the Chinese content of the exhibition, as well as the artists Xu Bing and Zhang Peili, whose works are part of the exhibition. The table was moderated by Raquel Caleya, director of Culture at the Cervantes Institute.

Throughout these two days, several work tables will be held structured around thematic lines such as methodological approaches in teaching ELE or the analysis and current situation of Spanish textbooks, in addition to emerging technologies such as AI applied to teaching.

In addition to Luis García Montero, in charge of the opening of the symposium, the Spanish ambassador to China, Marta Betanzos Roig, Chang Fuliang, president of the Spanish Subcommittee of the Guidance Commission for the Teaching of Specialties in Foreign Languages ​​and Literatures of the Ministry of Education of China, Chinese experts and Hispanists and academics such as Carme Riera or Darío Villanueva will participate.