Spain

Key Findings overall

Particular areas of recent improvement towards multilingualism are in pre-primary and primary education and immigrant languages, with the shift being progressive and regular.

It is also important to stress the change attempted by public services and spaces considering that a decade before one could hardly expect to find any language other than Spanish.

More or less the same can be said regarding newspapers and books where the offer is now huge compared with only a few years ago.

Nevertheless there are areas that need some thinking such as in audiovisual media and business where habit or traditional practice persists.

Promising initiatives and pilots

The document entitled Action Plan for the decade 2010-2020 signed in 2010 by the Government, lists 12 measures to improve language learning and multilingualism, teacher education being one of the most expected. 

Some of these objectives have already been reached by most of the autonomous communities although the terrible financial crisis we are immersed in has slowed down the initial desire.