Spanish in the United States

Spanish is the second most spoken language in the United States of America. Forty-five million Hispanophones speak Spanish as a first or second language, and there are six million Spanish language students in the United States. This makes the United States the third-largest Hispanophone country in the world after Mexico and Colombia. Spanish has both the largest number of native language Romance speakers and Indo-European language speakers in the world. About half of all American Spanish-speakers also assessed themselves as speaking English "very well"in the 2000 U.S. Census.

There are more Spanish-speakers in the United States than speakers of French, German, Italian, Hawaiian, varieties of Chinese and Native American languages combined. According to the 2012 American Community Survey conducted by the U.S. Census Bureau, Spanish is the primary language spoken at home by 38.3 million people aged five or older, more than twice that of 1990.

The Spanish language has been present in what is now the United States since the 16th and 17th centuries, with the arrival of Spanish colonization in North America. Colonisers settled in areas that would later become the states of Florida, Texas, Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, Utah, and California. The Spanish explorers explored areas of 42 future U.S. states leaving behind a varying range of Hispanic legacy in the North American continent. Western regions of the Louisiana Territory were also under Spanish rule between 1763 and 1800, after the French and Indian War, further extending the Spanish influence throughout the modern-day United States of America.

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