Written question asked by Lord Hammond of Runnymede (Conservative) on Monday, 1 March 2010, in the House of Commons. It was due for an answer on Wednesday, 3 March 2010. It was answered by Chris Bryant (Labour) on Monday, 8 March 2010 on behalf of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office.

Departmental Languages

Question: To ask the Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs how many (a) Ministers and (b) civil servants in his Department received coaching in a foreign language in the last 12 months; what expenditure his Department incurred in providing such coaching; and in what languages such coaching was provided.

Answer: One Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) Minister, Lord Mervyn Davies, undertook language training in the past 12 months at a cost of £212.80.370 FCO civil servants have received language training in the following 52 languages (in no particular order):"French""Danish""Spanish""Vietnamese""Portuguese""Russian""Mandarin""Japanese""Nepali""Norwegian""Polish""Dutch""Turkish""Arabic""Dari""Spanish LA""Malay""Italian""Macedonian""Cantonese""German""Farsi""Pashto""Albanian""Uzbek""Somali""Urdu""Bulgarian""Bengali""Swedish""Montenegrin""Portuguese (Brazilian)""Hebrew""Georgian""Greek""Amharic""Bosnian""Ukrainian""Romanian""Korean""Hindi""Indonesian""Cantonese""Mongolian""Serbian""Czech""Sorani Kurdish""Persian""Thai""Slovene""Latvian""Tagalog."The total spend by the FCO's Language Policy and Standards Team from 1 March 2009 to date is £2,591,016. (This figure includes administration, travel and examination expenses.)

Secondary information