Tomorrow in Madrid, the Instituto Cervantes is going to be celebrating the E Day, a celebration of the Spanish Language! Read here on our blog to find out what’s going on and more about the Spanish Language.
The Instituto Cervantes has organised the ‘E’ Day in Spain, El día de Español, or more commonly known as El Día E. Tomorrow, the 20th June, is the official celebration day!
E Day in Spain
In the Instituto Cervantes head office in Madrid tomorrow there’ll be all sorts of activities going on. In the morning there’ll be writing activities, popular poems and story telling. At half 5 in the afternoon there’ll be a showing of the Chilean film “La buena vida”, The Good Life! In the evening, from 7,30 onwards,there’ll be music shows! In the Plaza del Rey in Madrid, next to the Instituto Cervantes head office.
You can choose and vote for your favourite words in Spanish on the official website for the ‘E’ Day celebrations. Some of the top voted words at the moment are Infamia (infamy), cariño (sweetheart), luz (light) and abrazo (hug)! The E Day has a Facebook page and a Twitter page that you can have a look at for more information on the day and the events, and there’s also a bit of information on the Instituto Cervantes website.
On their official page you can see the words most voted for, the press information, videos, and there’s even a blog! Some interesting facts that you can read on their homepage include these:
-In 2030, 7,5% of the world population will be Spanish speakers! That’s a higher percentage than the number of people that speak Russian, French and German!
- In 2050 the United States will be the principal Spanish Speaking country in the world
- In the time between 2000-2008 the amount of information in Spanish on the internet grew by 619,3%!
The event on Saturday to celebrate the Día E was a success!
A canon shot into the air thousands of piceces of coloured paper that were later picked up by the people taking part in the activities! These bits of paper had each one of them one of the ten top-voted Spanish words! The top 10 were: Fiesta (party), Bailar (dance), Beso (kiss), Abrazo (hug), Amor (love), Añoranza (yearning), Sonrisa (smile), Chèvere (a word used mostly in Central America as a synonym for gozo, joy), Chocolate and Hola! The words were picked by all the people that took part in the voting via the internet on their webpage.
The Instituto Cervantes is going to make this celebration coincide every year with the Saturday before the Summer Solstice, because Spanish is the 4th language most widely spoken on the planet! The 3 languages most spoken are Chinese, English and Hindi. On Saturday the Instituto Cervantes also published a report called “El español, una lengua viva”, meaning “Spanish, a living language”, full of interesting information on the advance of the Spanish Language.
Nice to hear that Intituto Cervantes would coincide celebration every year before the summer solstice, I am looking forward to that because its a lot of fun especially the pieces of colored paper with Spanish words in it