The 2012 Yearbook “Spanish in the world”, which has just been published by the Cervantes Institute, has revealed that Spanish today occupies the third place on the Internet as the most used language , including social networks, after having grown by 800% in the last decade. And that on Twitter is already the second most used language after English . The data reveal that in this popular microblogging platform, “it is ahead of Portuguese and Japanese, and quite a distance from Arabic, Russian, Italian, French and German”, according to the Cervantes Institute, which highlights the fact that “Mexico (in seventh place) and Spain (in eleventh place) are among the countries with the highest per capita use of Twitter.” As for Facebook, the social network has more than 80 million Spanish-speaking users.
The director of the Institute, Víctor García de la Concha, has also highlighted some 495 million people speak Spanish in the world, and that in 2030 7.5% of the world’s population will be Spanish-speaking and only Chinese will be ahead of the Spanish in number of native-proficient speakers.
