Spanish is a global language of strategic importance to Spain's foreign policy.
The international promotion of Spanish constitutes a strategic line of Spain's foreign action. Spanish is the second language globally by number of native speakers, with a Spanish-speaking community of more than 500 million people. The total number of native and non-native Spanish speakers amounts to more than 600 million, representing 7.5% of the world population. Every year, the Instituto Cervantes Yearbook offers data reflecting the current status of Spanish around the world.
Organizational structure
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs, European Union and Cooperation, through the State Secretariat for Ibero-America and the Caribbean and for Spanish around the World (SEPICEM), is responsible for the “formulation, coordination and implementation of Spain's foreign policy for the defence and promotion of Spanish around the world" (Royal Decree 1184/2024). Since 2021, this State Secretariat has included a Directorate-General for Spanish in the World, whose purpose is to ensure the coherence of State action to amplify the presence and profile of Spanish abroad and to optimize the full potential offered by the language at an international level.
The following organizations are attached to the Foreign Ministry:
- Instituto Cervantes, which promotes the teaching, study and use of Spanish at its more than 100 learning centres located in over 54 countries across the globe.
- AECID, which plays an important role in this area, including through its Spanish readership programme.
- Global Observatory of Spanish, which, under the leadership of Instituto Cervantes, aims to become a key tool for defining strategic actions to foster and extend the use and understanding of our language.
Public Diplomacy
A key goal of our foreign policy is to promote the use of Spanish in multilateral diplomacy, in collaboration with the other countries for which Spanish is an official language. Spain has signed 12 bilateral memorandums of understanding with Ibero-American countries on the promotion of Spanish in diplomacy and international organizations. These memorandums champion the global nature of Spanish and its status as an official language of the United Nations, and seek to strengthen the different Groups of Friends of Spanish.
Other geopolitical aspects of the use of Spanish of particular relevance for the Foreign Ministry are the promotion of Spanish in science and technology (especially the development of a Spanish-language AI model that reflects the importance and global linguistic diversity of our language) and the fight against disinformation in Spanish, which is strategic to the defence of digital and cognitive sovereignty against technological architecture and disinformation campaigns.
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‘Caja de las Letras’ of the Cervantes Institute in Madrid, which has 1,800 safe deposit boxes from what was formerly the headquarters of the Central Bank. Today, many of these boxes house the legacies of some of the most prominent intellectuals in Spanish-language culture. Photo: Verónica San Narciso (Nolsom) / MFA