We need to talk about the original question. I read several interesting posts and I can answer.
Yes, spanish rapidly plunging into bottom most. There are 10 reasons to consider Spanish NOT important.
1. It is only spoken by 20 million as secondary and foreign tongue. So, Spanish has fewer speakers in that aspect than Swahili, Cantonese and of India or China. It is NOT in the top ten languages as secondary/foreign tongue.
2. It is spoken by 500 million, total speakers. These data are also bad. It is NOT in the top ten languages and it will never be in these group. English, French, Chinese, Hindi, Arabic, and Russian has more total speakers than French.
3. Real Spanish is dominant language NOWHERE. Other languages like English in Asia, French in Africa, Russian in Eastern Europe, or Arabic in the Middle East in Eastern Europe are really important in a big area as lingua franca and secondary tongue. Real Spanish is only dominant in Castilia. It is not in top ten in Europe, fourth in Western Hemisphere (after English, French, Portuguese and Quechua) and not in the used in Africa as lingua franca in those areas.
4. The globalization affects to Spanish very bad. It is probably one of the languages that suffer more this situation. Why to study the "second with most speakers" I can study English or French? Several old Spanish colonies have added English as business, international or DE FACTO official language, like Puerto Rico, Panama, Honduras, Costa Ricae etc.
For example, Philippines, Marianas and Guam belong to Asia Pacific. This countries has English as official language. At this moment, nobody speak Spanish in these countries. All people study English.
5. The strengh of Portuguese. Portuguese is official in Brazil and Fernando Noronha. It is very studied in Colombia, Argentina, Uruguay, Peru, Venezuela, Ecuador, Paraguay, Bolivia and Chileall these countries Spanish will dissapear.
6. Business. English is the business language. In Honduras, Puerto Rico, Costa Rica and even Mexico and Colombia. English is the business one. Even in Spain it is the language to use with international tourism because Spain is frequented by the British tourists and Spaniards are rapidly adopting the language of these numerous british tourists..
7. Diplomatic field. English and French is the diplomatic language too, not Spanish.
8. The strengh of English, French and Russian. These languages has the fastest growing number of secondary and non-native speakers and as lingua franca nowadays. French is the most spoken Western language as secondary language according to George Weber and English the most foreign speakers. They attack directly Spanish, but they are more studied in the educational system of several countries instead of Spanish.
9. Economics. The hispanic countries are the poorest on Earth: El Salvador, Bolivia, Paraguay, Ecuador, Guatemala, etc
10. Finally, we can see that Spanish is fragmenting in Hispanic America, Andalusia and Canary Islands. It's rapidly evolving into several variants that would end up as either a MACRO-LANGUAGE like Chinese(with several mutually unintelligible dialects) or like Latin which it's now extinct and the only remaining modern remnants are French, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian, Catalan, adn Spanish the most likey heir Latin's destiny. Hispanics are also called Latinos meaning Latin people. Chamorro, Chavacano, and Papiamento speakers commented that the speech of those areas are closer to their Spanish than to Castilian. Speakers of Spanish in one country have a hard time understanding the Spanish of another country. It's a sign that the differences between its dialects are widening despite the modern means of communication like TV, radio, and books. Spanish speakers have no discipline because they take their language for granted, mangle it and insist of using their local Spanish even though many of them are educated wherein the medium of instruction during their school days was Standard Written Spanish.
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