Spanish in the United States

El español en Estados Unidos

1513–. Spanish was spoken in what is now the United States before English: Ponce de León reached Florida in 1513, and in 1598 Juan de Oñate founded the colony of San…

What happened

Spanish was spoken in what is now the United States before English: Ponce de León reached Florida in 1513, and in 1598 Juan de Oñate founded the colony of San Juan in New Mexico, the heart of the oldest continuously spoken Spanish in the country. Its speakers kept old forms such as vide ('vi'), truje ('traje') and asina ('así'). The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848) made the Spanish-speaking Southwest part of the US; New Mexico and Arizona had to wait until 1912 for statehood, partly because most of their people spoke Spanish. Twentieth-century migration from Mexico (from 1910), Puerto Rico and Cuba, then Central and South America, made Spanish the country's second language. In 2023 Hispanics numbered 63.7 million, 19% of the population, the fifth-largest Spanish-speaking population in the world; of the 22% of Americans who speak another language at home, about 61% speak Spanish. Younger generations acquire less of it, so Spanish is increasingly a 'heritage language'.

Read about it

• El español en Estados Unidos — Spanish in the United States

Connected

• The fall of Tenochtitlan (13 August 1521)
• Mexico loses half its territory: the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (2 February 1848)
• Cinco de Mayo: the Battle of Puebla (5 May 1862)
• Lunfardo: the words of immigrant Buenos Aires (c. 1870–1920)
• José Martí and the Cuban War of Independence (24 February 1895–1898)
• The Disaster of '98 (1898)
• Spanish today: almost 635 million speakers (28 October 2025)

Sources

1. El español de los Estados Unidos: caracterización del español patrimonial (F. Moreno Fernández, Anuario 2008) — Centro Virtual Cervantes
2. El español en Estados Unidos: perspectiva histórica (Carmen Silva-Corvalán, Anuario 2000) — Centro Virtual Cervantes
3. Panorama del español tradicional de Nuevo México (Damián Vergara Wilson, Informes del Observatorio) — Instituto Cervantes at Harvard University
4. La definición del spanglish en la última edición del Diccionario de la Real Academia (2014) (Glosas, ANLE) — Academia Norteamericana de la Lengua Española
5. El español, lengua de herencia en Estados Unidos: Introducción (Kim Potowski, Anuario 2025) — Centro Virtual Cervantes
6. New Data on Detailed Languages Spoken at Home (2017-2021 ACS) — U.S. Census Bureau