Ane- Good morning, we are Garazi Larrea, Beat Uirbe-Etxebarria and me Ane Escala

and our topic of research is Spanish as a global language in media.

First of all we wanted to know some general information about the situation of Spanish
in the world. In the webpage studyinternational.com we found that there are more than
400 million native Spanish speakers in the world, making it the second most widely
spoken language, with official language status in 21 different countries. In terms of how
many people speak it as their first language it is slightly ahead of English (328 million)
but far behind Chinese (1.2 billion). Then we wanted to focus on media, the actual
topic, so we searched in the webpage Marca Espaa, which is a long-term project aimed
at strengthening Spains image among Spanish citizens and abroad. According to this
webpage Spanish is the second most widely used language on the Internet, only behind
English. In fact, it expanded by 807.4% from 2000 to 2011, whereas English grew by
301.4% in the same period.
Garazi- The next step was to get information about the use of Spanish in almost every
day webs or social networks. The first webpage is Wikipedia, the most famous
multilingual, free-content encyclopedia. According to Wikistats, Spanish is fourth in
terms of content managed by Wikipedia.org with about 1,100,000 articles in Spanish.
Then we focused more in the social networks, as it is there where we participate in an
active way and share our language worldwide. According to Lingos Blog, Spanish
speakers make up the second largest linguistic group with more than 90 million users on
Facebook.com. In twitter only 34% of the tweets are in English, while the 12% of the
tweets are written in Spanish.

But of course media doesnt only focus on the internet, so we visited the webpage of the
Cervantes Institute, which is a worldwide non-profit organization created by
the Spanish government to promote the education, the study and the use of Spanish
universally. In regards to press and mass media, the Cervantes Institute found that many
American media corporations are paying more attention to their Spanish speaking
audience, and that the Spanish language is constantly present in the media, specially in
newspapers, magazines and radio. This also applies to advertising, as the impact of
commercials among Spanish speaking audiences in the US increases 30% when they are
broadcasted in Spanish.
Beat-Apart from all these information, we wanted to know how important Spanish is
in other countries. We found the answer to this question in an interesting article about
Spanish in Studyinternational.com. According to this article, the interest in studying
Spanish isnt only growing among university students. Research conducted for the
Telefnica Foundation found that bilateral trade increases by almost 300 percent when
Spanish is the common language of commerce, suggesting that it is in the best interest
of countries and companies looking to expand into the fast-growing Latin American
markets to ensure they have Spanish-speaking employees and representatives.
Spanish is so important in the US that it has become part of the conversation for the
2016 presidential candidates. Democrat Hillary Clinton has produced videos and
content for her campaign website in Spanish, while Republicans Marco Rubio, who is
bilingual, and Jeb Bush, who is fluent in Spanish, have made media appearances
speaking in Spanish and even used some Spanish in speeches.
But, is Spanish a Lingua Franca or is it only a big international language? We searched
for a complete definition of lingua franca in Encyclopedia.com. According to the
Columbia Encyclopedia lingua franca is an auxiliary language, generally of a hybrid

and partially developed nature, which is employed over an extensive area by people
speaking different and mutually unintelligible tongues in order to communicate with
one another. I few analyze the Spanish language, we can see that it is mostly used as a
primary language, so it doesnt fulfill the rule of language employed by people
speaking different tongues as English does. Therefore, in simple terms we can see that
English is, in short-term at least, the closest language to a Lingua Franca.