Dario Villanueva, the director of the Royal Spanish Academy, said in an interview with Efe in San Juan that, “Spanish in the U.S. is gaining tremendous momentum thanks to the growing regard for Hispanics.” Villanueva is an advocate for bilingualism in modern society, and cites Spanish as being a good example of a language that lives in harmony with many others. There are reportedly over 45 million Hispanophones who speak Spanish as a first or second language in the U.S. and 6 million Spanish language students, making the number of Spanish speakers in the U.S. greater than the population of Spain.