Toronto approved the proclamation of April 23rd as Spanish Language Day. From now on, the influence of Spanish in the most diverse city in Canada is officially commemorated.
The commemoration of Spanish Day around the world was established by the United Nations Department of Public Information in 2010, “to celebrate multilingualism and cultural diversity, as well as to promote the equitable use of its six official working languages. throughout the organization ”.
Toronto approved the proclamation of April 23 as Spanish Language Day. From 2021 and onwards, the influence of Spanish is officially commemorated as a unifying element.
John Tory, the mayor of Toronto, said the proclamation is a recognition of the influence of the language and its speakers. “Facts like this also contribute to preserving the language in future generations, as a recognition of its history and culture.”
#TOHablaEspañol, the campaign
To celebrate this date in Toronto, the #TOHablaEspañol campaign was created, which aims to promote the use of Spanish, as well as to recognize the influence of Spanish-speaking people in the city.
The School Board of the Catholic District of Toronto and the general consulates of Argentina, Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Mexico, Panama, Peru and Uruguay will organize TOhablaespañol, a virtual event to commemorate the day.
According to the 2016 Population Census, of the more than 35 million inhabitants of Canada registered at that time, the number of Spanish speakers increased by almost one million (14.5%) compared to the figures of 2011, when the survey was carried out. previous census.
By comparison, the share of Canadians who have English or French as their mother tongue continues to decline, from 82.4% in 2011, to 80.2% in 2011, and finally to 78.9% in 2016.
More than 700 thousand people speak Spanish in Toronto. Nearly 100,000 students attend one of the 193 Catholic elementary and secondary schools in Toronto’s Catholic school system (of which more than 6,300 speak Spanish).
Spanish, the second most spoken language in the world
Today, Spanish is the second mother tongue in the world by number of speakers after Mandarin Chinese and the third most used language on the internet, where it has great potential for growth.
The authorities of the Instituto Cervantes in Madrid released the annual report detailing the situation of the Spanish language in the world. There are almost 600 million people who speak Spanish; that is, 7.6% of the world population.
In the last year, there are five million more who speak Spanish, information that reaffirms its upward evolution in the last decade, in which speakers have grown by more than 30 percent.
A point that is often left out of the official statistics is the number of Canadians, of any origin, who have a command of Spanish, as a second or third language. In the past, these analyzes have led to the prediction that the total population that speaks or uses Spanish at some level exceeds one million people in Canada.
By Silvia Méndez
