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Ministry of Defence: Mandarin Language

Answer

We have deemed language specialist to be a service person holding an in date formal MOD language assessment of Level 2 and above (even if not actively using the language day to day), and any civil servant (Burnham Lecturer) or military person employed in teaching languages to defence personnel on an ongoing permanent basis or supporting operations.

Detailed historical data on those personnel ‘in date’ before 2018 is unavailable, we only know the number of exams that were passed in the respective years going back to 2012. We have not included those for the purposes of this answer. The information available is in the following table:

Serial	Language	Numbers 'in date' (Jan 24)	Numbers 'in date' (Jan 23)	Numbers 'in date' (Jan 22)	Numbers 'in date' (Sep 21)	Numbers 'in date' (Dec 19)	Numbers 'in date' (Sep 18)
1	Russian	163	155	111	106	80	81
2	Arabic	99	117	121	132	187	196
3	Farsi	38	42	38	40	21	24
4	Mandarin	15	22	18	22	12	12
5	Cantonese	9	With Mandarin as Chinese to mid 23	Counted with Mandarin	Counted with Mandarin	Counted with Mandarin	Counted with Mandarin
6	Dari/Pashtu	5	16	5	8	9	13

Secondary information

Type

Written question

Reference

12759

Session

2023-24

Grouped for answer

Yes

Subjects

Ministry of Defence Mandarin language

Contains statistics

Yes

Link

View this Written question on www.parliament.uk