One language, two shores

There are two Guadalajaras, one in Jalisco and another in Castilla, and this phrase can be read in both without translation. It is worth starting there, because October 12th is approaching and with it a paradox that almost no one notices: it is the only holiday on the Hispanic calendar that changes its name depending on the country celebrating it. In Spain, it is called one way; in the Americas, in several ways, and in recent decades more than one country has preferred to rename it to face its own history head-on. That debate exists, is legitimate, and has its forums. This notebook is not here to arbitrate it. It comes to point out what remains standing beneath all the names: that morning, on both sides of the Atlantic, hundreds of millions of people will debate, celebrate, or nuance the date in the same language.

The figure and its fine print

Let us look at numbers, along with their history. Every autumn, the Instituto Cervantes presents its yearbook, "Spanish in the World," in Madrid. In the 2025 edition, presented in October by its director, the poet Luis García Montero, the front-page figure is impressive: 635.7 million people can communicate in Spanish today, thirty million more than a year earlier.

In this house, figures are read in layers, and this one has three. Just over 520 million speak Spanish as a mother tongue: it is the largest native community on the planet after Mandarin Chinese and Hindi. The rest are divided between those who speak it with limited competence and those who study it—and the yearbook's own projections estimate that students will reach one hundred million by the end of the century. It is worth adding the fine print that the headline omits: the entity measuring is an interested party, as the Cervantes exists precisely to promote the language. That is why we provide the layers and not just the cover page. Even read with all due caution, the figure supports something that no nuance refutes: few languages in the world allow citizens of twenty-some countries to understand each other without an interpreter, and no other does so with a literature so equally shared across its shores.

A round-trip canon

Because a language is not just demographics. It is a co-owned library, and that of Spanish was built with shipments in both directions. In the 17th century, a Mexican nun wrote verses in a parlor in Mexico City that are studied today in Salamanca. In the 19th century—as we already recounted in this notebook when discussing the liberators—a native of Caracas named Andrés Bello wrote a grammar designed, according to its own title, for the use of Americans, and the common language became understood as the heritage of all who speak it. At the end of that century, a Nicaraguan, Rubén Darío, renewed poetry in Spanish, and it was the poets of Spain who learned from him. In the 20th century, the shipment crossed the sea once again: readers in Madrid and Barcelona discovered that much of the best novel writing in their language was being done in America, and for decades dictionaries have been made together, with academies from both sides working at the same table. Spanish has no headquarters. It has shores.

Anyone searching for the exact distribution of merit will waste their afternoon: the canon of this language does not admit customs borders. And therein lies the difference with almost any other major language in the world: a university student from Lima and one from Pamplona do not merely share an instrument of communication; they share Cervantes and García Márquez, Machado and Borges, without either of them reading foreign literature.

The university rectors did not wait for the anniversary

This is not just a matter of cultural nostalgia; it is becoming institutional architecture. On April 21, 2026, at the Universitat Jaume I in Castellón, the II Mexico-Spain Summit of Rectors met, organized by the CRUE and its Mexican counterpart, ANUIES, with twenty-seven Spanish universities and one from Andorra in the delegation. The final declaration commits to very concrete goals: joint programs and degrees, physical and virtual academic mobility, simplification of study recognition, and Binational Chairs that will function as a permanent instrument for shared research and training.

Let anyone who believes that the brotherhood of language is merely an anniversary toast read this slowly: while public conversation debates the name of a holiday, the rectories of both shores are signing documents so that a student can pursue education across both countries without changing languages. The common language is ceasing to be a landscape and is becoming an infrastructure.

Let us be honest here too: sharing a language does not guarantee mutual understanding. Speaking the same way does not prevent misunderstandings, prejudices, or distances—as any family knows. The common language is the condition for conversation, not the conversation itself. That has to be built: sitting down, reading one another, listening to one another. Exactly what those rectors went to Castellón to do.

The language you did not write

On TheNomba's journey, there is a screen in the second stage that says it all at once: "There is a part of you that you did not write: your origin, your family, your language, your first bonds." The philosopher Higinio Marín explains there that this inherited history does not limit you, but rather opens the way for you. Language is the first inheritance you received without signing anything, and with it arrived, intact, the library of both shores: five hundred years of people thinking in your language about almost everything that is going to happen to you.

That is why the journey takes reading so seriously. Each stage ends with a reading plan, the library holds more than five hundred titles recommended by allies, and the goal has been declared since the first stage: that after the journey you will never stop reading. Of Cervantes, those screens say something that serves as an entire program: his stories do not pull us out of reality—they expand it. The grand appears in the small: a gesture, a dialogue, a minimal scene. That, exactly that, is what is celebrated by whoever celebrates a language.

The bookshelf test

We are not going to tell you what to call October 12th; that dispute is not ours, and each country resolves it in its own home. Instead, we propose an exercise that answers itself, like the other tests in this notebook. Open your reading list from the past year—the real one, not the one you would declare in an interview. Count how many authors there are from the other shore. If you read from Spain and America does not appear, or you read from America and Spain does not appear, you do not have an ideological problem; you have half a library untouched, and it was yours.

The liberators, as we recounted a few weeks ago, read first and decided later, and on their shelves both shores coexisted completely naturally. Two centuries later, 635 million people fit into this language. On your shelf, at least, its two shores fit. October 12th, whatever it is called where you live, is a good day to verify this.

Cover image generated with artificial intelligence.