I tuned into a classic rock station last week, and heard Santana’s Oye Como Va. As a child, I remember Eres Tu. Then there was Mas Que Nada. More into my era, there was Rock Me Amadeus and 99 Luftbalons. Relatively recently there was Gangnam Style. But it seems to me that there were more foreign language hits in the U.S. when I was a kid than there have been recently.
True, or am I just out of touch?
How dare you forget “La Bamba?”
How dare you also forget “Sukiyaki.”
Sent from my hand-held telephonic communication device using Tapatalk
Pata Pata by Miriam Makeba is mostly in Xhosa.
Mas Que Nada by Sergio Mendes & Brasil 66 is in Portugese.
The Girl from Ipanema by Stan Getz, João Gilberto, and Astrud Gilberto is partly in Portugese.
Águas De Março by Elis Regina and Antonio Carlos Jobim, and Desafinado by Stan Getz and João Gilberto are in Portugese, but I don’t know if they count as hits. They’re very well-known in the jazz world, but not so much as pop songs in the U.S.
Last year there was a thread about this, though not really focusing on recent changes.
Guantanamera- the Sandpipers
Not sure if it counts as a ‘hit’, but “Du Hast” by **Rammstein **got a fair amount of radio airplay in the U.S.
How do you measure hits these days? Gangnam Style was pretty popular a few years back but I don’t ever remember hearing it on the radio.
“Hocus Pocus” by Focus. Yodeling is a foreign language, right? 
Rosalía just brought down the ceiling at the Grammys and I’m reasonably sure “Malamente” ain’t in inglés.
The Hot 100 these days is ranked these days with a mix of sales (including digital sales), airplay, and streaming (apparently, US views for a song on Youtube is included.) Info here
“Gangnam Style” reached #2 on the Hot 100. I do remember it being somewhat played on radio, but I mostly remember it from weddings/parties, news stories, and just general pop culture. I think I may have watched the video two or three times as well (so that would have counted in the data, as US impressions on Youtube do seem to count – not specifically mentioned in that article, but it’s mentioned in the Wikipedia article on the Hot 100.)
Spanish is *not *a “foreign language” in the USA. If you mean “hits not in English”, why not say that?
And regaeton is HUGE at the moment. You may have heard of a little* song called Despacito?
People, please read what the OP actually said. The key question is this:
He is asking about RECENT foreign language hits. Listing hits from the 50’s to the 90’s misses the entire point.
South Korean boy band BTS has hit the Billboard Top Ten twice with songs at least partly in Korean. Not sure how long they stayed in the charts or if they’re considered true hits - I’ve never heard them but I’m not the band’s target demographic.
Neither are Korean, or Chinese, or German, or French… but it’s the convention used by among others the Oscars. Shorthand names are inaccurate pretty much by definition: the accurate version is the one that’s being shortened.
I’d argue that Spanish (and to a much lesser extent French) are *not *like Korean, German or Chinese, in terms of their “foreign-ness”, in that they are mother tongues of groups of people who are *not *immigrants to the US, but existed in-place *before *the US took them over.
And what the Oscars class as foreign isn’t really relevant, they’re a hidebound and old-fashioned institution. And in any case, US films *can’t *be entered for the International Feature award category, so whether Spanish is or isn’t a foreign language to the US isn’t addressed by the contemporary Oscars anyway.
The reggaeton trend is happening right now.
Pink Martini, an American band from Portland, has had a couple of minor foreign-lanuage hits, like “Sympathique” and “Donde Estas, Yolanda?” I think they only charted in other countries, though. A *lot *of their music is in other languages.