El español a escena: análisis de su promoción internacional y nuevas propuestas by Jesús Fernández González etal (review)

• Autores: Elena Retzer
• Localización: Hispania, ISSN 0018-2133, Vol. 109, Nº 3, 2026, págs. 513-516
• Idioma: español

• Es reseña de:

  • El español a escena: análisis de su promoción internacional y nuevas propuestas

    Jesús Fernández González, David Fernández Vítores, Rebeca Gutiérrez Rivilla, Javier Serrano Avilés

    Universidad de Jaén, UJA Editorial, 2025. Lingüística, 17. ISBN 9788491596998

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• Resumen

  • Published by the Universidad de Jaén last year, El español a escena: Análisis de su promoción internacional y nuevas propuestas is a needed language policy and linguistic demography book divided into ten chapters, a bibliography and an appendix. Its authors are Jesús Fernández González, David Fernández Vítores, Rebeca Gutiérrez Rivilla and Javier Serrano Avilés. The main focus of the volume is the role of Spanish as an international language, as well as the challenges [End Page 513] inherent in promoting the learning of ELE, e.g., Español como Lengua Extranjera (Spanish as a foreign language) on an international stage. Despite oft-repeated adages about global importance of Spanish as the second mother tongue in the world, spoken by 7.5% of the world population (in 2024), that unites more than 600 million native speakers and is studied by further 23 million as a foreign language, truly reliable data about its learners, teachers and institutions is both scarce and incomplete.

    One of the authors' stated objectives is then to offer a realistic overview of where, how and by whom is Spanish is learned and taught as a second language, foreign or heritage language. Such rigorous, detailed analyses of precise and real numbers of ELE learners on a global level, of teachers entrusted with teaching these students, of schools, universities and other academic centers (both public and private), of governmental agencies, such as ministries or departments of education responsible for regulating these programs, and all other professional associations, publishers, and even tourist agencies, both in those countries where Spanish is the official language and in non-Spanish-speaking countries, would go a long way toward streamlining efforts to promote its international reach within educational and cultural industries. Recent establishment of the Observatorio Global del Español (within the Cervantes Institute, https://observatoriodelespanol.cervantes.org/observatorio/) in 2023 and of the Observatorio Nebrija del Español (https://www.nebrija.com/catedras/observatorio-nebrija-espanol/) in 2021 are two such initiatives for the international promotion of the teaching, study and use of the Spanish language and the dissemination of Hispanic cultures.

    Spanish teachers and language program administrators (possibly faced with calls to justify the existence of their curricula in an increasingly unfavorable environment of budget cuts and declining enrollments) will find two main sources of information about numbers of Spanish students referred to in the book of interest: El mundo estudia español (https://www.educacionfpydeportes.gob.es/mc/redele/el-mundo-estudia-espa-ol.html), published by the Spanish Ministry of Education, Professional Training and Sports; and the volume El español en el mundo. Anuario del Instituto Cervantes https://cervantes.org/es/sobre-nosotros/publicaciones/espanol-mundo-anuario-instituto-cervantes-2024, published by Instituto Cervantes (9), both providing official data obtained by government agencies in different countries. Another resource of interest to Spanish-language professionals will be the Atlas de la lengua española en el mundo https://cervantes.org/es/sobre-nosotros/publicaciones/atlas-lengua-espanola-mundo.

    Another noteworthy resource to be found in El español a escena is an exhaustive list of Spanish and international institutions active in the advancement of Spanish-language studies (14), such as the Real Academia Española (RAE, https://www.rae.es/); the Asociación de Academias de la Lengua Española (ASALE, https://www.asale.org/); as well as the Asociación de Centros de Lenguas en la Enseñanza Superior (ACLES, https://www.acles.es/); the Federación Española de Asociaciones de Escuelas de Español como Lengua Extranjera (FEDELE, https://fedele.org/) and the Asociación de Programas Universitarios Norteamericanos en España (APUNE, https://www.apune.org/es); the Asociación para la Enseñanza del Español como Lengua Extranjera (ASELE, https://asele.org/); the Federación Internacional de Asociaciones de Profesores de Español (FIAPE, https://fiape.org/) and the Unión de Editoriales Universitarias Españolas (UNE, https://www.une.es/).

    Chapter 3 of El español a escena introduces a three-tier classification of countries according to their "institutionalization" of Spanish teaching. Institutionalization is measured in terms of the presence or absence of...