According to the Cervantes Institute, in the year 2021, more than 493 million people had Spanish as their mother tongue. In turn, the group of potential users of Spanish in the world already exceeded 591 million (7.8% of the world population).

Spanish is considered the second mother tongue in the world by number of speakers, after Mandarin Chinese, and the second language of international communication after English.

For demographic reasons, it seems that the percentage of the world's population that speaks Spanish as their native language is increasing, while the proportion of Chinese and English speakers is decreasing.

More than 24 million students study Spanish as a foreign language.