Voices en Español

At a Spanish interent conference last month, Carmen Caffarel, director of the Insituto Cervantes, announced her ambitions for the organization charged with spreading the Spanish language and Spanish culture around the world.

During the Foro Sociedad en Red conference in Madrid, Caffarel said that her goal is to make Spanish the second most-used language on the Web. 

Caffarel said that Instituto Cervantes and Google Spain are in talks to find a way to improve the online representation of the institution and the Spanish language better in the U.S. market. Other projects in the works is the creation of two new Instituto Cervantes web portals with the domain names española.es and español.es. The Cervantes institute is also going to have a new online radio and Internet tv channel that will broadcast interviews, documentaries, roundtables and special reports in Spanish.

With more than 400 million Spanish speakers in the world, it would seem natural to think that fulfilling Caffarel’s goal would be easy, but it’s not. Currently, less than 5% of web pages are written in Spanish, where as approximately at least 45% are written in English. On Wikipedia, for example, there are currently over 2 million articles available in English but only 294,000 in Spanish. German, Dutch, Italian and even Polish(!!) have more articles written in their languages on Wikipedia than Spanish does. It’s also interesting to note that French, a language which has fewer native speakers than Spanish, is the number one Romance language on the internet, in terms of web pages written in that language.

According to Internet World Stats, Spanish speakers represent only 9% of users. And outside of the U.S., which has some 40 million Spanish speakers, no Spanish-speaking country is in the Top 10 of countries for internet usage. While there needs to be more material in Spanish available on the web, there also needs to be more usage by Spanish speakers. While their participation levels are rising, there’s still plenty of room for growth.