Presidential support
From the Editorial Staff
La Jornada Newspaper, Wednesday, October 29, 2025, p. 5
Although he is embroiled in controversy for his derogatory remarks towards female writers, the director of the Fondo de Cultura Económica, Paco Ignacio Taibo II, will remain in his position, confirmed President Claudia Sheinbaum.
–Don't you think it's time to make changes in the management of the Fondo de Cultura Económica?
"No, no, no, not at all. He's a great colleague. We already said that we're going to do a special collection of Mexican women writers; well, Mexican and Latin American women writers," she said during her conference without elaborating further on the subject.
There are 520 million native Spanish speakers worldwide.
Armando G. Tejeda
Correspondent
La Jornada Newspaper, Wednesday, October 29, 2025, p. 5
Madrid. The Spanish language is at its peak, with unprecedented and rising numbers: there are currently 520 million native Spanish speakers worldwide, but the number of potential speakers, including those who speak it as a second or third language, is already 635 million. Although English remains the global language, Spanish is gaining increasing prominence, as are Mandarin Chinese and Hindi, which continue to hold the first and second positions among the languages with the most native speakers on the planet.
The annual report of the Cervantes Institute, Spanish in the World 2025 , confirmed the good moment of our language, with an expansion in countries that do not have Spanish as an official language, such as the United States, Brazil, the United Kingdom, France, Germany and Portugal.
The Cervantes Institute, one of the most important institutions in the promotion of Spanish in the world, presented its yearbook with updated data on the state of this language, including the increase in speakers, as confirmed by Luis García Montero, director of the organization, which in turn depends on the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Spanish government; in fact, its head, José Manuel Albares, was present at the presentation, and wrote an article on Spanish and diplomacy.
The report includes several key findings, such as the fact that the native Spanish-speaking community will surpass 500 million speakers for the first time in 2025. This figure places it as the third largest community in the world, behind native speakers of Mandarin Chinese and Hindi. The report highlights that there are approximately 460 million native Spanish speakers in Latin America, where speakers with limited proficiency number around 25 million. Furthermore, one in ten native Spanish speakers resides in non-Spanish-speaking countries, a fact that underscores its importance as a migrant language. The number of potential Spanish speakers outside of Spanish-speaking countries exceeds 120 million, with the European Union as a whole being home to more than 45 million Spanish speakers, in addition to those residing in Spain.
In the presentation, García Montero explained that "through the yearbook we want to reclaim the democratic values implicit in our history and in our present, in the concerns of our language in a polarized world in which we live and in which Western societies suffer the tension of public debate."
Working tour in Mexico
The director of the Cervantes Institute begins a working visit to Mexico today, where he will participate in the ceremony awarding the 2025 Excellence in Humanities Prize to poet Marco Antonio Campos, to be held at the San Lázaro Legislative Palace. He will also participate in the opening ceremony of the Biennial Congress of the Society of Hispanic Poetry of the Renaissance and Baroque periods and will meet with the rector of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), Leonardo Lomelí Vargas, to discuss various collaboration agreements between the two institutions.
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