List of countries and territories where Spanish is an official language

Territory	Status	Population (2021)[24]	Regulatory body	More information
Puerto Rico[lower-alpha 6]	De jure[25]	3,142,779	Academia Puertorriqueña de la Lengua Española	Puerto Rican Spanish

Notes:

Spanish is not the official language of Andorra but holds a special status in some fields, namely in education and business.[27] Public education in Spanish (following the Spanish public education system) is offered in the country. It is the second-most spoken language in the country, with nearly half of the population conversant in Spanish, rivaling the official Catalan in both native and total speaker numbers.[28] Spanish has also emerged as the lingua franca between various linguistic groups and in the commercial sector, which has triggered government efforts to promote the more general and universal use of Catalan.[29] In 2008, 30.8% of students were enrolled in the Spanish education system.[30]

Spanish has no official recognition in the Central American nation of Belize, a Commonwealth of Nations member state where English is the official national language. However, the country shares land borders with Spanish-speaking Mexico and Guatemala and, per the 2010 Belizean census, Spanish is spoken by a sizable portion of the population; 30% claim Spanish as a mother tongue and about 50% of the population has a working knowledge of the language.[31] The Census Report 2010 reported that 56.6% of Belizeans spoke Spanish.[26]

Spanish is not official in the British Overseas Territory of Gibraltar, which shares its only land border with Spain. Nevertheless, Spanish is compulsory for secondary school students and a mixture of Spanish and English called Llanito is colloquially spoken among most inhabitants. Recent trends since the 2000s have found, however, that Spanish proficiency and usage among younger generations is declining as members of these groups tend to use English exclusively.[32][33]

Percentage of the U.S. population aged 5 and over who speaks Spanish at home in 2019, by US States.

Spanish has been spoken in the United States for several centuries in the Southwest and Florida, which were all once part of New Spain. However, today only a minority of Spanish speakers in the U.S. trace their language back to those times; the overwhelming majority of speakers come from recent immigration. Only in northern New Mexico and southern Colorado there have been Spanish-speaking communities uninterruptedly since colonial times.[34]

Spanish is the most studied foreign language in United States schools and is spoken as a native tongue by 41 million people, plus an additional 11 million fluent second-language speakers.[35] Though not official, Spanish has a special status in the American state of New Mexico.[36] With almost 60 million native speakers and second language speakers, the United States now has the second-largest Spanish-speaking population in the world after Mexico.[37] Spanish is increasingly used alongside English nationwide in business and politics. Media in Spanish has also become influential outside of native Hispanophone circles.[38][39] In the United States, the language is regulated by the North American Academy of the Spanish Language.

Spanish was the official language of the Philippines from the beginning of the Hispanic period in 1565 and through independence until a constitutional change in 1973. However, President Ferdinand Marcos had Spanish redesignated as an official language under Presidential Decree No. 156, dated 15 March 1973 and Spanish remained official until 1987, when it was re-designated as a voluntary and optional auxiliary language.[40]

On 8 August 2007, President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo announced that the Philippine government asked for help from the Spanish Government in her plan to reintroduce Spanish as a required subject in the Philippine school system.[41] By 2012, the language was a compulsory subject at only a very select number of secondary schools.[42] Despite government promotion of Spanish, less than 0.5% of the population can speak Spanish at least proficiently.[43]

While Spanish is designated as an optional government language in the Philippines, its usage is very limited and not present in everyday life.[44] Despite this, Tagalog and other native Philippine languages incorporate a large number of Spanish loanwords, as a result of 300 years of Spanish influence. In the country, Spanish is regulated by the Philippine Academy of the Spanish Language.

Spanish is a secondary language, alongside the official Arabic, in the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic, a former Spanish colony and now a partially recognized state that claims Western Sahara, whose territory is mostly occupied by Morocco. However, Spanish is not a native language in the territory, and the Moroccan government uses Arabic and French in its administration of Western Sahara.[45][46]