The Melding Americas : Language : To Get Ahead, U.S. Learns to Speak Up--in Spanish : As commercial ties strengthen, fluency is valued as a major business asset. Study programs have burgeoned.

U.S. banker James R. Callahan has lived in Chile for 14 years and feels at ease in both business and social settings. It helps that he speaks Spanish fluently.

“I think it’s extremely important, because unless you’re able to speak the language you miss some of the nuances--it tends to be a little bit more stilted,” Callahan said. “You limit yourself if you don’t speak the language.”

As U.S. business with Latin America expands and the Latino population in the United States also grows, Americans are paying closer attention to signs that say Se Habla Espanol. “Spanish Spoken Here.”

U.S. commercial ties with Mexico are burgeoning under the North American Free Trade Agreement, and similar pacts with other Latin American countries are expected in the future. The United States will be linking its livelihood more closely to a community of 19 countries and 300 million people, from the Rio Grande to Cape Horn, who share the common bond of the Spanish language. And the 155 million Brazilians speak Portuguese, a close linguistic cousin of Spanish.

In the United States, there are an estimated 24 million Latinos, 7.7 million of them in California. If Americans who learned Spanish as a second language are added, the total number of U.S. Spanish-speakers is estimated at 30 million or more.

Those who learn Spanish--at home, in the classroom or on the street--are acquiring one of the world’s four most-spoken tongues, one of vivid expressiveness and rich cultural tradition. Worldwide, about 370 million people speak Spanish, most of them in this hemisphere. Only Mandarin, Hindi and English are spoken more widely. Writers of Spanish have won 10 Nobel Prizes for literature. “Don Quixote de la Mancha,” written by Spain’s Miguel de Cervantes in the early 17th Century, is recognized as one of the greatest novels ever written in any language.

For Callahan, the First National Bank of Boston’s vice president and general manager in Chile, Spanish is a cultural and social attribute and also a major business asset. He took private language classes in the United States and was able to speak and understand Spanish when he came to Chile with his family in 1980 as a junior lending officer.

“When I first came down here, there was another American who was here before I was, the commercial manager,” Callahan recalled in an interview. “Within a year and three months I had replaced him, because he was learning how to speak Spanish but he didn’t feel comfortable enough in Spanish to invite clients in for lunches and things like that. As soon as I arrived I started inviting people in for lunches, and he would attend but he couldn’t really keep up. It was a real big factor, I think.”

Other Americans obviously agree. Inmaculada de Habsburgo, director of the Spanish Institute in New York City, said demand is high for the institute’s private language classes. “We have a lot of professional people who want to speak Spanish, because they need it professionally, you know, so we have lawyers, we have bankers,” Habsburgo said in a telephone interview.

“I would think the NAFTA treaty has woken up a lot of people,” she said. “They see now that they are going to be doing more commerce, not only with Mexico but with the whole of Latin America.”

David Gies, a professor of Spanish at the University of Virginia, observed that Spanish is increasingly important, not only for international commerce in the hemisphere but also for working in the United States.

“The U.S. Census Office predicts that by the year 2010, Hispanics will surpass any other group as this country’s largest minority,” Gies said. “They are also predicting that by the year 2020 there will be 51 million Spanish speakers in the United States.”

Gies, who heads the university’s department of Spanish, Italian and Portuguese, said that a generation or two ago, French and German were the most popular foreign languages in U.S. classrooms.

“Those were the languages that one was told to study in high school and college because those were the useful languages, the languages of international intellectual discourse,” he said. “Well, that has just changed radically. French across the country is way, way down, and Spanish is way up.

“And that isn’t because we’re sitting in high schools and colleges demanding that people take Spanish. The people are coming to us and saying, ‘Hey, look, this is the language we need to learn, this is the language we want to learn.’ ”

The American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages reported that 2.6 million middle and high school students in the country were taking Spanish classes in 1990. A survey by the Modern Language Assn. the same year found that 534,000 U.S. university students were studying Spanish--up 40% from 1983--accounting for nearly half of all college students registered for foreign language courses.

Lynn Samdstedt, president of the American Assn. of Teachers of Spanish and Portuguese, predicted more growth in future surveys.

“You’ll see a marked increase in the number of students in both the high school and university studying Spanish because the demand is becoming much greater,” said Samdstedt, who teaches at the University of Northern Colorado in Greeley.

As Spanish-language studies have burgeoned in the United States, so has English instruction in Latin America. In many grade schools and high schools around the region, English classes are obligatory. And private academies dedicated solely to teaching English have proliferated. There are an estimated 100 such schools in the Mexican city of Monterrey, a business hub 140 miles south of the Texas border, but there are also dozens in cities as far away as Santiago and Buenos Aires.

Most Americans already have a start on Spanish. Buenos dias. Tacos, por favor. Muy bueno. Gracias. Adios. Who doesn’t know those words? And cognates are easy: rapido, familia, terrorista, metal, sexo. Such words mean the same as their English look-alikes, and the list is long. But to learn a language well requires a great deal of study and practice, and that includes Spanish.

Many Americans mistakenly consider Spanish to be a simple, inelegant language, according to Samdstedt. “It’s because we suffer from an ignorance of the Spanish culture,” he said. “Very few people in this country know of the great literary works that came out of Spain and have come out of Mexico and South America over the past years, literary works that compete favorably, certainly, with the other great literature of the other countries of the world.”

But more and more Americans are aware that Spanish is a practical language, he said.

“The practicality of the language, when they can see that it’s going to help them earn a living in the future, is one of the things drawing students to this,” he said. “It’s happening in communications, it’s happening in business, it’s happening in medicine and nursing. The need for bilingual doctors and nurses in this country is increasing daily.”

Samdstedt and Gies both said that increased knowledge of Spanish in the United States will translate into greater understanding of Latin America and stronger hemispherical ties.

“Of course we’re going to get closer,” Gies said. “Because we are, you know, in a smaller world now, aren’t we? We all talk about global economy, we all talk about diversity, we all talk about multiculturalism. And I think in fact that there’s a fusion going on, a linguistic fusion across the northern-southern divide. And I think it’s a healthy thing.”

Meanwhile, many native speakers of Spanish in the United States are more interested than ever in preserving their cultural heritage, according to Odon Betanzos, director of the Academy of the Spanish Language in North America.

“Fifteen or 20 years ago there wasn’t this concern for maintaining Spanish,” Betanzos said by telephone from New York. “This concern started to become decisive in the last four or five years.”

His theory is that a growing Latino middle class is behind the movement to preserve Spanish in the United States. “It is an incipient middle class, and it knows the value of bilingualism: A bilingual person is worth two,” said Betanzos, a Spanish literature professor at City University of New York.

The United States now has more than 100 Spanish-language newspapers, 240 Spanish-language radio stations and three Spanish-language television networks. These media are growing not only in quantity but also in quality, Betanzos said. “They serve as a nexus of union for the diverse Spanish-language communities--this together with a very interesting phenomenon of an enormous number of Spanish-language cultural or political or social organizations.”

Betanzos has a dream: “In about 20 or 30 years, Spanish could be the language for communication alongside English in the United States. Look where we are heading. This might be an immoderate ambition, but it is an ambition.”