IT HAS BEEN Bad Bunny’s biggest, baddest month yet. Last week the Puerto Rican singer, Spotify’s most-streamed artist in four of the past six years, became the first musician to win an album-of-the-year Grammy for one entirely in Spanish. In his acceptance speech he won cheers for a swipe at Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown: “ICE out”. On Sunday he will be the first Latin star singing primarily in Spanish to headline the Super Bowl halftime show.
Last week the Puerto Rican singer became the first musician to win an album-of-the-year Grammy for one entirely in Spanish (AP)
Bad Bunny’s triumphs add to an impression that Spanish is rising unstoppably in America. With more than 40m Spanish speakers, it is the fifth-biggest Hispanophone country in the world. Babbel, which makes a language-teaching app, says that the share of its American users studying Spanish has shot up from 26% to 60% from 2012 to 2025. The company notes that Spanish podcasts are gaining listeners, Spanish-speaking artists are winning more Oscar nominations and Spanish-speaking books are being checked out in growing numbers from libraries, among other indicators. Such trends sharpen a decades-old fear that America is becoming a bilingual country, fundamentally different from the one most Americans knew.
That is unlikely. The number of Spanish-speakers in America will probably plateau, and eventually reverse, for two reasons. The obvious one is immigration policy. Under Mr Trump the flow of immigrants from Latin America has become a trickle. And ICE is deporting as many illegal (and sometimes legal) immigrants as it can. The crackdown will no doubt ease under a future Democratic administration, but America will probably not be as welcoming as it once was.
Another trend is less visible and as important. The longer Latino families stay in America, the less Spanish they speak. According to Pew, a pollster, 69% of second-generation Latino immigrants—that is, the first generation born in America—speak Spanish. That drops to 34% of the third generation. Pew does not survey later generations, but overall just 57% of American-born Latinos speak Spanish.
In contrast to many English-speakers, Spanish-speakers fret—with good cause—about the fate of their language in America. “No sabo kids” don’t speak Spanish or speak it badly. (No sabo is “Spanglish” for “I don’t know”. In proper Spanish it’s no sé.) A majority of non-Spanish-speaking Latinos admit that they have been shamed by other Latinos for not speaking it. But 87% of American-born Latinos say that speaking Spanish is not necessary to be considered Latino.
America is changing Spanish as much as Spanish-speakers are changing America. Borrowings from English like “bildin” and “jaiscul” (“building” and “high school”) are common. Kim Potowski of the University of Illinois, Chicago, highlights how Spanish words are being used in English ways, as in “escribir un papel”, “to write a paper” (papel is not used for that kind of paper in Spanish). American Latinos borrow entire grammatical structures from English in sentences like “Es la chica que hablé con”—”that’s the girl I was talking with”—whereas conventional Spanish requires the equivalent of “that’s the girl with whom I was talking.”
America’s assimilation machine has, over the centuries, turned huge waves of Germans and Italians into monoglot Americans. For a while, thanks to bilingual schools and Spanish radio and television stations, it looked like Latinos might be the exception. They’re not. Mr Trump won nearly half of the Latino vote in 2024; 36% of Latinos support making English the official language. Spanish is under threat in America, not English. Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl set may signify not the rise of Spanish in America, but its peak.
