University of Wisconsin-La Crosse | uwlax.edu
Spanish at UWL
Why Learn Spanish?
Why learn Spanish?
- Spanish is a language of critical importance in the United States in any career
- Spanish is the native language of approximately 410 million people, and is spoken by approximately 470 million people worldwide
- Spanish is second only to Mandarin Chinese in the number of native speakers
- Spanish is the third most common language on the internet
- Spanish is the second most studied language in the world
- Spanish is the second language of international communication
- Spanish is one of the six official languages of the United Nations
- Spanish is an official language of the European Union and of Mercosur
- The United States is the world's second-largest Spanish speaking country with approximately 50 million native and non-native speakers of Spanish
- Mexico is the largest Spanish-speaking country with over 110 million speakers
- Spain is the third-largest Spanish speaking country (46 million), and the second-largest when considering only native speakers
- Spanish is a good language to study due to its lexical similarity to other Romance languages (lexical similarity is 89% with Portuguese, 85% with Catalan, 82% with Italian, 76% with Sardinian, 75% with French, and 71% with Romanian)
