Does Barack Obama Speak Spanish?

Diplomacy, or being able to interact, communicate, and negotiate with world leaders and peoples from all around the world is an extremely important skill for the President of the United States, and it can be helpful if the president knows multiple languages. So does this former president know Spanish?

Barack Obama does not speak fluent Spanish. He has released various ad campaigns in Spanish and has otherwise spoken in Spanish on television many times, but considers himself to be monolingual.

Read more below to find out about what other possible languages Obama speaks, how native speakers rate his speaking in other languages, and presidents who were multilingual.

Obama’s Language Education

Obama took Spanish in high school, calling it “just painful,” while speaking with the creator of Duolingo, a free language-learning app, Luis von Ahn. “My accent is terrific, but I have the vocabulary of a 2-year-old,” Obama explained of his Spanish-speaking skills.

As for other languages, Obama was born in Honolulu, Hawaii, and lived there until he was six, when he moved with his mother, Ann Dunham, and stepfather, Lolo Sotero, to Jakarta, Indonesia. For four years, when Obama was in 1st grade to when he was in 4th grade, he lived there and attended Indonesian-language schools, and became fluent in Indonesian as well as his native English.

For 5th grade, Obama, his mother, and his stepsister moved back to Hawaii and he began attending the Punahou school, choosing to live with his grandparents to stay there for high school when his mother and stepsister returned to Indonesia.

Obama has said that he used to be fluent in Indonesian, but didn’t use it much after returning to Hawaii in his childhood, and can now only maintain conversational Indonesian. In a 2008 interview, Obama spoke on the importance of teaching foreign languages in schools, confessing, “I don’t speak a foreign language. It’s embarrassing!”

While he isn’t fluent in any language other than his native English, he has conversational skills in at least Spanish and Indonesian. His Spanish he uses more frequently, in ads like this one or posts like this one.

Obama may not be fluent in Spanish, but his Spanish is highly rated by native Spanish speakers. The Embassy of Spain even commented, “He really has a knack for languages. His pronunciation in Spanish is almost perfect!”

His conversational Indonesian skills are also highly rated, which makes sense, given the time he lived there when he was young. Native speakers also gave him props for his attempts at phrases in Swahili, Persian, Greek, Dutch, Arabic, German, and Hindi.

Of all the languages he’s used phrases in, it was only his French that was truly lacking, with his Spanish being the best, or at least the most practiced.

Watch the YouTube video below to see one of Obama’s early ads entirely in Spanish.

Multilingual Presidents

It’s not uncommon for presidents to have studied foreign languages at some point in their education. Out of the 45 presidents there have been, 21 have been fluent or partially fluent in a language other than English, the unofficial language of the United States.

Obama was partially fluent in Indonesian, as well as knowing some conversational Spanish and a few phrases in other languages. Both George W. Bush and Jimmy Carter were also partially fluent, or at least conversational, in Spanish, and Bill Clinton was partially fluent in German.

Going back through the history of the presidents, there have been a few polyglots like John Quincy Adams, who was fluent in French, German, and Latin on top of English, and was partially fluent in Dutch, Greek, Italian, Spanish, and Russian. Thomas Jefferson knew the second-most languages with being fluent in French, Italian, Latin, and English, while being able to read in Greek and Spanish.

Presidents were most likely to learn Greek and Latin, while French and German were also popular.

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