Puerto Rican megastar Bad Bunny hosted Saturday Night Live last weekend. During his opening monologue, he told the enthusiastic crowd that he was excited to perform at the Super Bowl halftime show in 2026 and that people across the world who love his music were looking forward to it. Switching to Spanish, he then emphasized “especially all the Latinos and Latinas across the world, and here in the United States, all those who have worked to open doors. This is more than an achievement for myself, it’s an achievement for all of us, proving that our footprint and our contribution to this country, no one will ever be able to take that away or erase it.”
“If you didn’t understand what I just said,” he continued, switching back to English, “you have four months to learn!”
Can You Learn Spanish in Four Months?
Bad Bunny’s Spanish-language statement made an important point. He is not the first hispanophone (primarily Spanish-speaking) musician to become popular in the mainland United States, but he is the first to have an all-Spanish language album top the Billboard 200 charts and the first to have such an album win a Grammy. Previous Spanish-speaking singers, including Puerto Ricans Ricky Martin and Jennifer Lopez, have sung in both English and Spanish. Bad Bunny has presented it as a point of pride that he will not strive for “crossover” success with bilingual records.
Some negative responses to the NFL’s choice of Bad Bunny for the Super Bowl spot have centered on his insistence on singing in Spanish. By speaking in Spanish and then inviting his English-speaking audience to learn Spanish before the Super Bowl, he responded to those objections.
But is it possible to learn basic Spanish in four months?
It has been said that learning a language requires about 100 hours of contact with understanding. That is, listening to a language you cannot understand doesn’t count, but if you listen and speak a language with comprehension for roughly 100 hours, you should be at least conversant in that language, even if not fluent. Assuming that speakers of English spend one hour a day interacting with Spanish with understanding, they may be able to better follow the lyrics of the show by January assuming this metric is true.
Of course, it is also not always necessary to be fluent in a singer’s language to appreciate and enjoy that singer’s songs. Michael Jackson was a worldwide sensation back in the 1980’s, and it is likely that many young people around the world who enjoyed his music didn’t always know his lyrics.
Is There Value in Learning a New Language?
More than 60 million U.S. citizens already speak Spanish. 60% of the world’s people speak more than one language, but in the U.S., only about 20% can do so. That is as true in Puerto Rico as in the states — about 20% of people living on the Island are comfortable in English as well as Spanish.
Bilingualism has real advantages, from increased professional opportunities to improved cognitive capacity. It is certainly possible to make a strong case for all Americans to learn a second language. Why Spanish? It is the second most commonly-spoken language in the United States. It is spoken in about 20 different countries, with 560 million total speakers, so it is a practical choice for travelers as well. And of course learning Spanish will help monolingual English speakers get more out of Bad Bunny’s halftime show.
By the same token, English is the second most popular language in Puerto Rico, after Spanish, and the most commonly spoken language in the world. It is also the primary language of the U.S. federal court system, of which Puerto Rico is a part.
Why is language such an emotional issue?
“The Language Question” has been an important part of the status controversy in Puerto Rico from the beginning. While the earliest laws on language in Puerto Rico made it easier to import Spanish-language books, there were attempts to spread the English language to the people of the Island. In 1902, it was settled that both English and Spanish would be official languages in Puerto Rico, but the idea of English as a threat to Puerto Rican cultural identity has continued to rankle.
Statehood supporters generally call for bilingualism, but independence supporters often frame Spanish language exclusivity as resistance to colonialism. There is some irony there, since Spain held Puerto Rico as a colony for four centuries, but protection of the Spanish language continues to be a talking point for separatists.
