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WASHINGTON, May 7: Politicians use it to win votes, the business community to boost profits and sizeable numbers of Americans see it is a threat to American culture -- Spanish in the United States.

There are more Spanish speakers in the United States than, for example, in the whole of Venezuela, according to census figures.

First-time visitors to the United States are perpetually astonished by how pervasive the language has become.

It is the country's unofficial second language.

Spanish dominates in Miami, is everywhere in Los Angeles and widespread along the border with Mexico. Automatic teller machines from coast to coast offer menus in Spanish, and there are few toll-free telephone lines for goods or services that do not offer a prompt for Spanish.

Despite long-running attempts to make English the official language, the influence of Spanish in the United States is likely to grow, driven by politics, money and demographics.

Statistics tell the story. In 1980, according to census figures, there were 10 million Hispanics in the United States.

By 1990, the number stood at 23 million. It now is 40 million, both legal and illegal, whose disposable income is estimated at around 700 billion dollars, expected to climb to $1 trillion within the next few years.

Census projections put the number of Hispanics in 2050 at around 105 million, a quarter of the overall population.

KEY TO HISPANIC MARKET

While a majority of those now in the country say they speak English ''very well,'' according to the census, marketing experts see Spanish as a key to fully unlocking the rich Hispanic market.

U.S. businesses are spending an estimated 3 billion dollars a year on advertising in Spanish.

On the political front, Hispanics account for around 10 percent of the electorate and many politicians try to win their vote by speaking, or at least attempting to speak, Spanish to them. President George W Bush even gave his regular Saturday radio address in both English and Spanish early in his first term.

(His Spanish address drew mixed reviews. One Spanish journalist quipped that Bush spoke Spanish ''poorly but with great confidence.'' The bilingual format did not turn into a regular feature.) Promoting Spanish is anathema to many social conservatives who fear the United States is growing into a country with two dominant languages and two cultures. Overall, more than 300 languages are spoken in the United States, but traditionally, English has served as the linguistic glue that bound diverse communities together.

''The US has come together with one language -- English --which has been instrumental in the process of assimilation,'' said Rob Toonkel of US English, Inc., a lobby group which has campaigned for legislation to make English the official language since 1981.

SPANISH ANTHEM

The extent to which Spanish has become part of the increasingly emotional debate over immigration in the United States was thrown into sharp focus in a string of mass demonstrations that began on March 10 and turned Latin American immigrants from a barely visible minority ''hiding in the shadows of our cities'' as President Bush put it into a vocal and very visible force.

Speeches, banners and chants in Spanish poured fuel on anti-immigrant fires and the ''blogosphere'', often a good real-time gauge of popular sentiment, came alive with exchanges on the wisdom of using a language not understood by most Americans to ask for the right to stay in the country under lenient immigration laws.

''There's a great place to speak Spanish,'' commented one blog participant. ''It's south of our border and it's called Mexico.'' Others were less polite.

The language debate online and on radio talk shows bubbled up to the highest level of the US government after a British music producer last month introduced a Spanish-language version of the US national anthem. As with most other aspects of the immigration ebate, the reaction at the top laid bare divisions.

Bush said the hymn ''ought to be sung in English.'' A few days later, his secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, made clear she had no problem with a Spanish-language version.

''I've heard the national anthem done in rap versions, country versions, classical versions. The individualization of the American national anthem is quite under way.''

BILINGUAL ADVANTAGE

In essence, many of those who are concerned over the relentless spread of Spanish argue that through most of US history, it was the newcomers who had to learn English to become part of the United States while now English-speaking Americans were expected to learn Spanish.

That case was laid out by Harvard professor Samuel Huntington in a controversial 2004 book, ''Who are we?'' that provides the intellectual underpinning for many of the arguments in the present debate.

If Spanish continued to spread, he said, bilingual candidates for president and appointed national offices could have an advantage over English-only speakers.

He cited a 2003 survey that showed Spanish-only families in Miami averaged an annual income of 18,000 dollars English-only 32,000 dollars, and bilingual families 50,376 dollars.

''For the first time in American history, increasing numbers of Americans will not be able to get the jobs or the pay they would otherwise get because they can speak to their countrymen only in English.''

REUTERS