Case study: why Spanish remains a global language

We have already seen that the global status of French, especially in Africa, may be challenged by the promotion of indigenous languages and an increase in alignment with English-speaking communities.

Spanish, like French, is a global, colonial language which was spread across the world to the detriment of many indigenous languages. Yet, the status of Spanish seems less threatened by decolonisation and the growing recognition of indigenous languages. In this article, we will explore some of the reasons for this difference.

The timelines of colonialism

France and Belgium’s so-called “Scramble for Africa” occurred predominantly during the late 19th century (Yates, 2018). This gave relatively little time for the French language to establish itself before decolonisation in the mid-20th century. By contrast, the Spanish colonisation of Latin America began in the late 15th century and lasted until the late 19th century, giving the language 400 years to become embedded into Spanish-controlled territories.

In fact, by the time of independence, Spanish had become a key facet of nationalism for the people of Spanish-speaking Latin America. What brought the nation of Cuba together was its unique blend of languages and cultures which culminated in a rich tapestry of cubanismos (Spanish words specific to Cuba). What united Mexico was the way indigenous languages had shaped Mexican Spanish pronunciation (Stavans, 2018). In other words, the nations of Latin America had made Spanish their own and, far from abandoning it, they embraced it as a marker of national identity. As we saw the previous steps (2.10 & 2.11), this is not always the case in French-speaking Africa, where French is a second language for much of the French-speaking population. For many, French is the language of administration, of education and the media, but not necessarily of everyday communication.

Intermarriage and social integration

The Spanish colonial system encouraged the concept of mestizaje, or the mixing of different ethnic groups. This allowed people lower in the complex colonial Spanish caste system to climb the social ladder, contributing to the widespread adoption of Spanish as a lingua franca between mixed families. By contrast, French colonial policy generally maintained strict racial separation. Even if colonised Africans learnt French, converted to Christianity and assimilated to French culture, they were still not considered French enough to participate fully in society. The French army is said to have taught Senegalese soldiers a simplified version of French called français-tirailleur (rifleman French) both to humiliate and exclude them from integration following their service (Ropert, 2018). Unlike the Spanish, who were generally happy to mix with colonised populations and speak to them in Castilian, the French colonizers felt that the indigenous people were not cultivated enough to learn French properly, deepening linguistic divides and reserving French for the elites.

Competing colonial languages

You might remember from the earlier video on the future of French as a global language (step 2.10) that Rwanda shifted from French to English education overnight in 2008. Like Rwanda, other African countries such as Mozambique, Gabon and Togo have joined the Commonwealth, in part as a way of aligning themselves with neighbouring English-speaking countries. In Latin America, on the other hand, after gaining independence, nations largely embraced Spanish as an “essential agglutinating force” (Stavans, 2018) and faced no significant competition from other nearby colonial languages. Portuguese dominated in Brazil, but as Spanish was spoken widely in 19 Latin American countries, there was no reason to abandon Spanish in the same way that former French colonies have started to abandon French.

Spanish in the United States

Everything we have seen so far may explain why Spanish endured in the past, but will it maintain its status as a world language in the future? García (2014) argues that the “colonial relationship” between Latin America and the United States upholds the global status of Spanish today. Latinos make up 16% of the US population, giving them considerable buying power and influence in the world’s largest economy. Spanish speakers in the USA are said to contribute an estimated US$2.3 trillion to the economy, more than the GDP of any other Spanish-speaking country (Olson, 2025). This market strength, referred to as “communication value” or Q-value, is actively leveraged by Spain through institutions like the Instituto Cervantes to promote Spanish globally, even while adapting to the diverse varieties spoken (García, 2014).

Spanish’s deeper historical roots, more pervasive integration as a first language and significant economic contribution from a large diaspora in the United States have collectively contributed to its enduring global status. While both French and Spanish remain important global languages, it seems that Spanish has a more stable future ahead of it.

References

Ahumada, I. (2021). Church and Monarchy before the Hispanic-American indigenous languages (1503-1803). Káñina, 45(1), 141-158.

García, O. (2014). US Spanish and education: Global and local intersections. Review of Research in Education, 38(1), 58-80.

Olson, D. (2025). Making English the official US language can’t erase the fact that the US has millions of Spanish speakers and a long multilingual history. The Conversation. https://theconversation.com/making-english-the-official-us-language-cant-erase-the-fact-that-the-us-has-millions-of-spanish-speakers-and-a-long-multilingual-history-250030

Ramírez-Bañuelos, J. F. (2020). La (des) autorización del uso de la lengua náhuatl en la legislación de la Nueva España. Revista Jurídica Jalisciense, (63), 349-372.

Ropert, P. (2018). Le français “petit-nègre”, une construction de l’armée coloniale française. Radio France. https://www.radiofrance.fr/franceculture/le-francais-petit-negre-une-construction-de-l-armee-coloniale-francaise-6338796

Stavans, I. (2018). The Spanish language in Latin America since independence. In On Self-Translation: Meditations on Language, (pp. 123-134). State University of New York Press.

Wasserman-Soler, D. I. (2020). Truth in many tongues: religious conversion and the languages of the early Spanish Empire. Penn State Press.

Yates, D. A. (2018). Paradoxes of predation in Francophone Africa. International Journal of Political Economy, 47(2), 130-150.