Mapped: Top 15 Countries by Native Spanish Speakers
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Globally, there are 559 million people who speak Spanish. And if they were all one country, it’d be third by population after India and China.
This makes Spanish the fourth-most spoken language in the world after English, Chinese (Mandarin), and Hindi.
This graphic maps and ranks the top 15 countries by number of native Spanish speakers. Figures were sourced from Statista and are as of 2022. They used survey data to determine numbers and accounted for bilingual speakers as well.
The Countries Who Speak Spanish
At the top of the ranks, Mexico has 126 million native Spanish speakers, more than 20% of all the Spanish speakers in the world.
RankCountryRegion# of Native Spanish speakers
1 MexicoNorth America126.0M
2 ColombiaSouth America51.2M
3 ArgentinaSouth America45.4M
4 SpainEurope43.3M
5 U.S.North America41.8M
6 VenezuelaSouth America32.5M
7 PeruSouth America29.0M
8 ChileSouth America19.0M
9 EcuadorSouth America15.5M
10 GuatemalaCentral America13.6M
11 CubaCaribbean11.3M
12 Dominican RepublicCaribbean10.4M
13 BoliviaSouth America10.0M
14 HondurasCentral America9.4M
15 NicaraguaCentral America6.6M
Figures rounded.
Across the Isthmus of Panama, Colombia (51 million) and Argentina (45 million) are ranked third and fourth respectively.
Spain itself ranks fourth (43 million) and the U.S. rounds out the top five with 42 million Spanish speakers.
A quick glance of the map reveals a footprint from times past. Spain’s colonial expansion from the 15th to 19th centuries spread Spanish across the world, particularly in the Americas. In the process, Spain conquered many Indigenous civilizations, including the Aztecs in Mexico, and the Incas in Peru.
However, some of their culture survived, like in Quechua, a group of closely-related pre-Columbian Indigenous languages that originated in Peru. Today around 8 million people across Bolivia, Ecuador, Peru, Argentina, Colombia, and Chile speak it.
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Wondering what the same breakdown looks like for other languages? Check out the Countries with the Most Native French Speakers. France is #1. But who is second?
The post Mapped: Top 15 Countries by Native Spanish Speakers appeared first on Visual Capitalist.