By Damiano Beltrami

AMMAN - When José Luís Rodríguez enrolled in an Arabic summer programme at the University of Jordan (UJ) in June, he thought he would spend most of his time speaking Arabic. Instead, he has been chatting in his mother tongue all the time, with Jordanian students who love practising Spanish.

“I’ve been chatting with Ala, Maha, Mach, Shereen, Noor, Diala and Rasa today,” said the 33-year-old student from Albacete, Spain, sitting in the shade in front of the University Language Centre.

“They overheard my Spanish accent while I was hanging around on campus and asked me whether I wanted to do a language exchange.”

Spanish has become the most popular foreign language in Jordan after English, and every year more students want to pick it up, fascinated by the music, football, cinema and literature of Spanish-speaking countries, according to the UJ Department of European Languages and the Amman branch of the Cervantes Institute, a Madrid-based institution with schools all over the world devoted to teaching Spanish language and culture.

“When we established the Spanish programme in 1999 as a double major with English, we had about 50 students - now we have 550,” said Professor Ali Al Ali, the director of the department of European languages.

The Cervantes Institute confirmed the spike in Jordanians' interest in learning Spanish over the last few years. When the first course at the Amman Cervantes Institute was set up in 1994-1995, only 201 students showed up. In 2004-2005, the number of students enrolled more than doubled to 455, while in 2008-2009, 726 students have registered thus far.

Not only are the language courses well attended, courses on special topics are becoming increasingly popular. Jumping from three in 2005-2006 to 30 this year, the special courses offered at the institute include creative writing, Spanish through cinema, and Spanish-Jordanian intercultural studies, where students learn about the differences between the two cultures in terms of customs, such as body language.

“When you ask our students why they want to learn Spanish, they mention singers, especially the Iglesias, father and son, the Alhambra and the Cordoba Mosque,” said María José Molina, Head of Studies of the Cervantes Institute in Amman, suggesting that the capital is becoming the hot spot for Spanish mania in the region. “For them [the students] it is like taking back part of their history.”

The same trend appears in other countries of the region. In Syria, the students of the Damascus Cervantes Institute numbered 120 in 1990-1991, increasing to 499 in 2005-2006.

Similar figures come up in Lebanon: the total number of students in both the Beirut and Kaslik Cervantes Institutes was 320 in 1990-1991 and went up to 2,278 in 2005-2006, according to the latest Cervantes Institute annual report.

Seduced by Spanish

Jordanian students are seduced by Spanish for several reasons - sometimes unexpected ones.

“I fell in love with Real Madrid football player Raul González when I was a teenager,” said 23-year-old Aseel Abudayeh, turning bright red. “I really wanted to speak his language.”

Other students reckon that Spanish is going to give them more opportunities to work in the private sector in Amman as tour guides, or to get a job in Spain.

“I study Spanish because I want to do a PhD in Spain once I have graduated,” said 22-year-old Feda Majali, who is thinking about going into academia.

Others yet are simply fascinated by the sound of Spanish music.

“Of course I adore Enrique Iglesias,” 21-year-old Hala Amro told The Jordan Times with a large smile. “I want to translate literature from Spanish into Arabic.”

One of Amro’s Spanish language teachers at the University of Jordan, Ahlam Sbaihat, said she is overwhelmed with tests to grade.

“The Spanish classes are so popular that we had to put a cap on them at 550 students, otherwise we wouldn’t know where to put them,” she said. “They become familiar with Hispanic dances like flamenco, salsa and tango through Arabic films like ‘Ma Tigy Nurquis’ by Inas Daghedy, which means ‘Let’s Go Dancing'.”

And indeed, many Spanish-speaking Jordanian students do go dancing. You can find them on Tuesday nights jumping around the orange couches of Kanabaye, a café in Jabal Amman, to the rhythm of Bebe Valdez songs. Or you can find them on the terrace, sipping mint-flavoured lemonade and imagining themselves in Granada.

The success of the Spanish language in Jordan and the region reflects a global trend, according to the Cervantes Institute. Currently about 18 million people are studying Spanish in 90 countries. The language is spoken by over 400 million people, and the institute estimates that they will increase to 550 million by 2050.

In the meantime, Rodríguez tries to do his part to spread the language of Cervantes, Raul Gonzalez, and Julio and Enrique Iglesias on the UJ campus.

“I mostly listen to them, their Spanish is fantastic,” he noted. “The other day a friend told me ‘Volvimos a casa a las mil cuando chaparon todas las tiendas’ - 'We came home so late, all the shops had closed.’ The phrase was so idiomatic that I thought I was in Madrid.”