Is Spanish the Second Most Spoken Language? Not Any More

By the Audaz Revista editorial team

Updated October 1, 2026 · Reviewed by the Audaz editorial team

“Spanish is the second most spoken language on Earth.” You have probably read that line. It sits at the top of countless reasons to learn Spanish.

It used to be true, by one count. The source most people quote has now changed its answer. So we went back to that source and read the numbers ourselves.

Then we did something extra. A learner does not just speak a language. You read it. So we measured how much there is to read in Spanish, next to nine other big languages.

Why do people say Spanish is the second most spoken language?

Because the Instituto Cervantes said so. It is Spain’s public institute for the Spanish language. Each year it publishes a report on how many people speak Spanish.

Its 2023 report, El español: una lengua viva (Spanish: a living language), was clear. It called Spanish “the second mother tongue in the world by number of speakers, after Mandarin Chinese” (our translation). It also called Spanish the fourth language by total speakers, after English, Mandarin and Hindi.

That is where the famous line comes from. Notice it always had a condition. Spanish was second by native speakers only. It was never second by total speakers.

So where does Spanish rank in 2025?

From 2024, the yearly report moved into the Cervantes yearbook, El español en el mundo. The 2025 edition changed the ranking. Its key-facts page says native Spanish speakers are now “the third largest” community in the world.

Mandarin is first, as always. Hindi is now second. Cervantes puts native Hindi speakers at about 603 million. Spanish has about 519 million, a gap of roughly 84 million.

Spanish still has more native speakers than English. Cervantes’ own table puts English at about 390 million native speakers.

And if you count everyone who can speak it?

Then English wins easily. The same Cervantes table adds the people who speak each language without native command. Here are the totals we get when we add the two columns.

Spanish is fourth on this count. Add the 24.6 million people studying it, and Cervantes gets 635.7 million potential speakers. That still leaves Spanish fourth.

Our verdict: “second most spoken” is out of date. Say “third by native speakers, fourth by total speakers.” It is less catchy. It is also what the main source now says.

Why did Spanish drop from second to third?

Spanish did not shrink. Its native community grew from about 500 million in the 2023 report to about 519 million in 2025. What changed was Hindi.

The 2025 yearbook builds its Hindi figure from India’s 2011 census, projected forward to 2025. The key-facts page credits the jump to India’s fast population growth. The report also says many people who list Hindi as a second language probably speak it natively. If so, the Hindi figure could be even bigger.

The report also admits a hard truth. “Native language” means different things in different sources. Some count a mother tongue. Some count a first language. Cervantes counts native command. So no two lists match exactly.

Does Ethnologue agree with Cervantes?

Not exactly. Ethnologue is the language catalogue most websites quote. Its site blocked our requests, so we use the Ethnologue figures that Cervantes prints next to its own in table 7 of the yearbook.

The two counts differ by about 35 million Spanish speakers. Cervantes says Ethnologue starts from older population figures. Either way, the order of the big languages stays much the same.

How much is there to read in Spanish? We measured it

Speaker counts tell you how many people you could talk to. But at Audaz we care about reading. So on 1 October 2026 we measured three things for ten big languages.

• Wikipedia articles. The article count each language edition reports about itself.
• Active Wikipedia editors. Registered users who did something on that edition in the last 30 days. It shows how many people are writing in the language right now.
• Wikipedia page views. Human views in August 2026, from the Wikimedia statistics service.
• Free classic e-books. Project Gutenberg titles tagged with each language, counted through the Gutendex catalogue.

Here is where Spanish lands among these ten. It is fourth for articles. It is sixth for page views. It is fourth for free classic e-books. And it is second for active editors, behind only English.

So there is one place where Spanish really is second. It is the number of people writing in it on Wikipedia each month. That is a living, growing body of text.

What surprised us in the numbers?

Hindi has more native speakers than Spanish. But Spanish Wikipedia has about 12 times as many articles as Hindi Wikipedia. Speakers and reading material are not the same thing.

The free classics shelf was the other shock. French has far fewer native speakers than Spanish. Yet Project Gutenberg tags about 4.6 times as many books French as Spanish.

Why learn Spanish if it is not second?

Because rank was never the point. Third or fourth in the world is still enormous. And the numbers that matter to a learner look good.

You will join a very large group of learners

About 24.6 million people study Spanish as a foreign language, Cervantes says. The United States alone has about 8.9 million of them. There, 76% of school pupils who take a foreign language choose Spanish.

Cervantes also cites Duolingo’s 2024 report. Spanish was the second most popular language on the app, after English. It was the top language people learned in 33 countries.

Your Spanish works across 21 countries

Spanish is the majority native language of 21 countries, on three continents. Mexico is the giant, with about 130 million native speakers. Colombia, Spain and Argentina each have more than 46 million.

Then there is the United States. It has about 45.5 million native speakers and 20 million more with some Spanish. Count both groups and only Mexico has more people who can use Spanish.

Which Spanish should you learn? Any of them. They understand each other. Our guide to Latin American vs Spain Spanish maps the real differences.

Spanish pairs well with English

Cervantes calls Spanish plus English “the most promising” pair for talking across borders. Together they have about 1,000 million native speakers. One or the other is official in more than 75 countries.

Young Europeans are catching on. In the EU, 7% of people over 15 can hold a conversation in Spanish. Among 15 to 24 year olds, it is 13%. Cervantes takes those figures from the EU’s Eurobarometer survey.

There is a lot of Spanish to read online

Spanish is the second most common language on websites, Cervantes reports, at about 6% of pages. English is far ahead at about 49%. Add the busy Spanish Wikipedia, and you will not run out of things to read online.

What does this mean for how you learn Spanish?

Reading is how big numbers turn into real Spanish. Our research on comprehensible input explains why reading at the right level works. For a reading list, try our Spanish novels for language learners.

This is Hispanic Heritage Month, too. Our Hispanic Heritage Month Spanish words and Latin American traditions show the culture behind those 519 million speakers.

Frequently asked questions

Sources

Instituto Cervantes, El español en el mundo. Anuario 2025: 20 claves del español en el mundo, Demografía del español en el mundo 2025 by Francisco Moreno Fernández and Héctor Álvarez Mella, and its data tables.

Instituto Cervantes, El español: una lengua viva. Informe 2023 (PDF).

Our measurement, 1 October 2026: Wikipedia site statistics for each edition, the Wikimedia REST API for August 2026 page views, and Gutendex for Project Gutenberg counts. Raw results are held by our editorial team.

In a hurry? We also made a short web story version of this piece.