Theodore Andersson

Spanish, Language of the Americas

I should like to explore together with you some of the meanings suggested by this title which has been assigned to me.* In what direction does the mind take off when the word Spanish is mentioned? We may think of Spanish as one of the international languages. With an estimated 150 million or more native speakers in Spain, North Africa, the Near East, the Philippines, and throughout Spanish America, it ranks fifth among the languages of the world. Chinese in its various dialects ranks first with an estimated 500 million or more. It is startling to consider that one person out of four on our planet speaks Chinese, and yet Chinese is taught in only 29 institutions of higher education and one high school in the U.S. There are only about half as many speakers of English as of Chinese, an estimated 275 million. Hindi and Urdu, closely related and therefore considered together, rank third with an estimated 150 million native speakers. There are also about the same number of native speakers of Russian. Following closely, Spanish is in fifth place, and then come German and Japanese with about 100 million speakers each. If we go down the list to 50 million speakers, we must include Malay, the national language of Indonesia, with 70 million speakers; Bengali, another language of India and of East Pakistan, with 67 million; Arabic, French, and Portuguese, with 65 million each; and finally Italian with 50 million. Let us note in passing that the five official languages of the UN include first place Chinese, second place English, Russian (which is tied for third place), fifth place Spanish, and French (which is tied for tenth place). My sub-title, Spanish of the Americas, bids us come a little nearer home, but the horizons are still vast, for they include 18 independent Spanish American nations, 9 in South America and 9 to the north, of which 6 constitute Central America. The remaining 3, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and Mexico, are our near neighbors. Furthermore, the boundaries between Latin America and Anglo-Saxon America provide no real obstacle. In addition to the original Spanish-speaking population residing in our Southwest and their descendants, we have had a considerable immigration from Mexico and our other Southern neighbors. The estimated 4 to 5 million native speakers of Spanish who live within our borders, of whom about a million are in Texas, constitute a precious human, linguistic, cultural, and political resource. The Commonwealth of Puerto Rico is a particularly fertile supplier of Spanishspeaking U.S. citizens. For example, one child out of 10 in the N.Y.C. schools is a Puerto Rican.