Spanish is the third most widely spoken language on earth
Why should you learn Spanish? Because a *lot* of people speak it. Spanish is the third most widely spoken language on earth, and even comes in before English, in term of native speakers. More people speak Chinese and Hindi natively than Spanish, and English comes in fourth. Here are the numbers:
- Chinese - (several different variants: Mandarin, Cantonese, Jin, Wu etc) 1080 million native speakers
- Hindi - (also including several variants) 370 million native speakers
- Spanish - 322 million native speakers
- English - 308 million native speakers
- Arabic - 206 million native speakers
- Portuguese - 176 million native speakers
I for one didn’t know that many people speak Portuguese. Since I already know Spanish, I’ve probably got a pretty good jump-start on learning Portuguese, I should look into that. Chinese wouldn’t be a bad choice either.
Here’s a quick map so you can see where all those Spanish-speakers are distributed around the globe.
The dark green areas are where Spanish is the official or primary language spoken, and the light green areas are where Spanish is an important secondary language, and the really light areas are where Spanish is spoken as a minority language. I adapted this map from a Wikipedia map. Thanks Wikipedia. 
