According to the 2023 American Community Survey conducted by the US Census Bureau, Spanish is spoken at home by 43.4 million people aged five or older, more than twice as many as in 1990.

Colonizers settled in areas that would later become Florida, Texas, Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, and California as well as in what is now the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico.

After the incorporation of those areas into the United States in the first half of the 19th century, Spanish was later reinforced in the country by the acquisition of Puerto Rico in 1898.

Waves of immigration from Mexico, Cuba, Venezuela, El Salvador, and elsewhere in Latin America have strengthened the prominence of Spanish in the country.

[9][10] During the late 18th and early 19th centuries, land claimed by Spain encompassed a large part of the contemporary U.S. territory, including the French colony of Louisiana from 1769 to 1800.

In order to further establish and defend Louisiana, Spanish Governor Bernardo de Gálvez recruited Canary Islanders to emigrate to North America.

The towns of Nacogdoches, Texas and Los Adaes were founded as part of this settlement, and the people there spoke a dialect descended from rural Mexican Spanish, which is now almost completely extinct.

Most of New Mexico, western Texas, southern Colorado, southwestern Kansas, and the Oklahoma panhandle were part of the territory of Santa Fe de Nuevo México.

[22] In 1898, consequent to the Spanish–American War, the United States took control of Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines as American territories.

In Hawaii, where Puerto Rican farm laborers and Mexican ranchers have settled since the late 19th century, seven percent of the islands' people are either Hispanic or Hispanophone or both.

In 1963, the Ford Foundation established the first bilingual education program in the United States for the children of Cuban exiles in Miami-Dade County, Florida.

The largest immigration wave occurred as a result of the Salvadoran Civil War in the 1980s, in which 20 to 30 percent of El Salvador's population emigrated.

The number of Salvadoran immigrants in the United States continued to grow in the 1990s and 2000s as a result of family reunification and new arrivals fleeing a series of natural disasters that hit El Salvador, including earthquakes and hurricanes.

[26] Refugees from Spain also migrated to the U.S. due to the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939) and political instability under the regime of Francisco Franco that lasted until 1975.

Virtually all state and federal government agencies as well as large corporations use English as their internal working language, especially at the management level.

Some states, such as Arizona, California, Florida, New Mexico, and Texas provide bilingual legislative notices and official documents in Spanish and English and in other commonly used languages.

[36][37] California's first constitution recognized Spanish-language rights: All laws, decrees, regulations, and provisions emanating from any of the three supreme powers of this State, which from their nature require publication, shall be published in English and Spanish.By 1870, English-speakers were a majority in California; in 1879, the state promulgated a new constitution with a clause under which all official proceedings were to be conducted exclusively in English, which remained in effect until 1966.

Although all official proceedings are to be conducted in English, the California courts system offers accommodations to Spanish speakers: A person unable to understand English who is charged with a crime has a right to an interpreter throughout the proceedings.Throughout the history of the American Southwest, the controversial issue of language as part of cultural rights and bilingual state government representation has caused sociocultural friction between Anglophones and Hispanophones.

In addition, there are several other major cities in Florida with a sizable percentage of the population able to speak Spanish, most notably Tampa (18%) and Orlando (16.6%).

New Mexican Spanish also contains loanwords from the Pueblo languages of the upper Rio Grande Valley, Mexican-Spanish words (mexicanismos), and borrowings from English.

Some 50.6% of the over 1.5 million U.S. students enrolled in foreign-language courses took Spanish, followed by French (12.7%), American Sign Language (7%), German (5.5%), Italian (4.6%), Japanese (4.3%), Chinese (3.9%), Arabic (2.1%), and Latin (1.7%).

[56] Spanish-language radio has influenced American and Latino discourse on key current affairs issues such as citizenship and immigration.

Many of these heritage speakers are semi-speakers, or transitional bilinguals, which means they spoke Spanish in early childhood but largely switched to an English-speaking environment.

The children of these immigrants tend to accommodate to more widespread use of tú, although at the same time they maintain occasional use of vos as a symbol of Central American identity.

Second-generation Salvadoran-Americans often engage in verbal voseo, using voseo-related verb forms alongside tú due to linguistic insecurity in contact situations.

[9] Spanish-language mass media (such as Univisión, Telemundo, and the former Azteca América) support the use of Spanish, although they increasingly serve bilingual audiences.

The annual State of the Union Address and other presidential speeches are translated into Spanish, following the precedent set by the Clinton administration in the 1990s.

Calvin Veltman undertook in 1988, for the National Center for Education Statistics and for the Hispanic Policy Development Project, the most complete study of Anglicization by Hispanophone immigrants.

[89] However, it was not until the late 20th century that Spanish, Spanglish, and bilingual poetry, plays, novels, and essays were readily available on the market through independent, trade, and commercial publishing houses and theaters.

Cultural theorist Christopher González identifies Latina/o authors—such as Oscar “Zeta” Acosta, Gloria Anzaldúa, Piri Thomas, Gilbert Hernandez, Sandra Cisneros, and Junot Díaz—as having written innovative works that created new audiences for Hispanic Literature in the United States.