Spain, currently one of Europe s leading industrial nations, was in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the foremost Western power, and Spanish is the native language of over five hundred million people. In those countries more than twenty in which it is officially spoken, it is second only to English. Spanish is an exciting and growing area of study, having become the second language in the United States, an official language in the European Union, the African Union, and the United Nations, and the second most important language on the Internet.