In our poll last week, we asked people which country they thought had the largest population of Hispanics. The answer is, of course, Mexico, whose estimated 109 million residents make it the leader by wide margin.

But a clear majority of people who answered our Quick Question guessed the U.S., perhaps sensing the weight of this country’s large and growing presence of people hailing from places where Spanish is the dominant language. In fact, there are about as many Hispanics in the United States — about 44 million — as there are in entire the country of Spain, making the two nations second only to Mexico.

That means there are more Hispanics in the U.S. than there are people in Canada (32.9 million) and there are more Hispanics online in the U.S. than there are people in six different European countries: Austria, Belgium, the Czech Republic, Greece, Hungary and Portugal. And it’s also why latino.msn.com was launched not quite four years ago as the Spanish language version of MSN.

"For MSN to succeed, we need to fully recognize the changing landscape of America," says Stephen Cvengros, general manager of MSN Homepage & MSN Latino. "With Latinos accounting for roughly 15 percent of the current U.S. population, they represent one of the fastest growing segmentations. Our investment represents a commitment to that audience and customers interested in deeply connecting that audience where it works and plays on the Internet."

But there's a funny thing about those 44 million U.S. Hispanics: Although many share cultural affinities around food, music, sports and other topics, they don't all speak Spanish. In fact, most second- and third-generation Hispanics in the U.S. prefer to use English or a mix of both languages, according to eMarketer analyst Debra Williamson.

So, while the sheer size and growth of the Hispanic population in the U.S. made the launch of MSN Latino an obvious choice, finding the right mix of programming is a subject of constant experimentation. U.S. Hispanics are also a far from a homogeneous crowd and hail from more than 20 different countries in Central and South America, the Caribbean and Spain.

The latest of those experiments comes in the form of stories from Latina Magazine, and are written in English. Why these stories? Because the stories from Latina Magazine — and any future forays into English on MSN Latino — are designed to provide culturally relevant news and information to Hispanics who prefer English, but who aren’t finding that kind of content elsewhere, said Karine Medina, MSN Latino's senior channel manager.

"We believe that when trying to reach Hispanics online, it is important to be inclusive. We realize that a good portion of the Hispanic audience in the U.S. is English dominant and although they consume a lot of content on the general market, they come to us looking for content that is culturally relevant to them in the language they prefer," she says.

So far, the experiments on MSN Latino have worked well. The site is one of the fastest growing members of the MSN family. This spring, latino.msn.com gained top dog status in audience when compared to Univision.com, Terra, AOL Latino and Yahoo! Telemundo, other sites that target the same group.

So while the U.S. population of Hispanics isn’t the largest in the world, it’s growing and changing quickly and MSN Latino is working to match it at every step. Are you a Hispanic reader? What kind of content would you like to see on MSN Latino? Use the box at the right above to send us a note.