Will Spanish laguage become more important in the future on less important?

[_OT]

Originally Posted by shamrockfisher

A few more generations will rapidly reduce Spanish speaking in the US to the equivalent need for Italian or German fluency.

I HIGHLY doubt that.

[salcover]

The Spanish language will never stop being important in the future regardless if the second and third generation Hispanics are not speaking Spanish anymore. There are over 400 million Spanish speakers world-wide. With more than 33 million speakers, Spanish is the second largest language in the United States. In addition, Hispanics are the largest minority in the United States, with the majority of them being Spanish speakers. The Spanish-speaking population is one of the fasting growing segments in the world, especially in the United States. Spanish, the official language in twenty-one countries, is the third most widely-spoken language in the world, after English and Mandarin. Experts predict that by the year 2050, there will be 530 million Spanish speakers, of which 100 million will be living in the United States.

It is estimated that 800 million people speak Mandarin. Spanish may not be spoken by the most people, but it is certainly spoken in more countries and those countries are more dispersed. Even though, second and third generation Hispanics maybe not be speaking Spanish anymore, the quantity of first generation Spanish speakers in the U.S and Spanish speakers in countries that have Spanish as the main language will continue to increase.

[Bert_from_back_East]

Spanish is a Third World language. Ick.

English is the language of the highest income, most developed countries in the world, i.e., United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, UK, Ireland.