Worldmapper: The world as you've never seen it before

Spanish

Spread of the Spanish language

This smaller map removes the countries where Spanish is dominant. This map therefore only shows 0.4% of all speakers of Spanish. The territories omitted are United States, Spain, Argentina, Chile, Costa Rica, Uruguay, Cuba, Mexico, Panama, Venezuela, Colombia, Peru, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Equatorial Guinea, Bolivia, Honduras, Nicaragua, Guatemala and Puerto Rico.

Click the map for a larger image.

Spanish is a Romance language (derived from Latin), and there are roughly 362 million first-language speakers in at least 39 territories. As well as being the primary language of Spain, it has been established since the 16th century as the dominant language of most of southern and central America, and there are also 28 million first-language speakers in the United States.

Modern Spanish originated from the region of Castile, hence the alternative name of Castilian.

Territory size shows the proportion of all people who speak Spanish as a first language that live in that territory.

Language Map Index
View labelled territory map or population map for comparison
Language data sources and tech notes
Data File: Excel, Opendoc format ( see notes )
All of the data we use is estimated; see data page

Open Population Map
for comparison

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