A Brief History of the Spanish Language in Asia

The region with the least Spanish speakers, Asia has hosted the Spanish language since the sixteenth century, when Spanish explorers colonized the Philippines and set about imposing their rule and spreading Christianity. Here, Spanish was spoken primarily by the elite – businesspeople, intellectuals, missionaries and the local court. But despite the populace being educated in Spanish throughout the nineteenth century, and Spanish being the location’s main tongue until the mid-twentieth century, American control of the islands and nationalist sentiments served to drastically reduce the number of Spanish speakers in the Philippines. Briefly in 1973, then finally in 1987, Spanish lost its title as the Philippines’ official language.

Today, the language is enjoying something of a renaissance in the country, and the various Philippine languages borrow a proportion of their vocabulary from Spanish – Tagalog, for instance, has been shown to contain between 20% and 33% words of Spanish origin. What’s more, Chavacano – spoken by 700,000 people – is a common creole tongue that’s largely based on Spanish.

But now, the trend is growing. There are currently 35 million people who are learning Spanish as a foreign language – an annual growth of 12%. The demand for Spanish is mostly found among young people, who understand that it will open doors for them in their future international careers.

The Cervantes Institute will focus its efforts on the booming Asia-Pacific region, where demand for Spanish instruction is growing fast. The Cervantes Institute, which promotes teaching of the Spanish language in the world, is dependent on the Spanish Ministry for Foreign Affairs. It has decided to center its efforts on Asia, because of the hugely demonstrated interest levels. In 2000, there were only 1,500 university students studying Spanish in the 90 universities that teach the language but now, there are more than 105,000.

Seventy percent of requests to study Spanish are currently rejected because there are not enough Spanish teachers there to teach them. China “exports” students to 34 Latin American and 22 Spanish universities. Meanwhile, in Hong Kong, the Hispanic culture is trending, says the report, and almost every Hong Kong university is offering Spanish-language courses.

In Japan there are more than 3,000 language schools teaching Spanish, and they will now have to offer it to all high schools as a foreign language.

In India, where there is the third largest education system in the world in terms of pupils, the presence of the Spanish language and culture is very recent – but represents a huge market.