<h6><strong>The Diplomat</strong></h6> <h4><strong>Spanish has shown "modest" growth</strong> <strong>in southeastern Europe in recent years, reaching 1.6% of the population in terms of Spanish speakers, although the language has "low institutionalization" in the educational system as a foreign language subject.</strong></h4> These are the main conclusions of the sixth volume of the "Spanish in Europe" collection, promoted by the Instituto Cervantes in collaboration with the University of Heidelberg (Germany) and the University of Zurich (Switzerland), entitled Demolinguistics of Spanish in Southeastern Europe. The document includes detailed information on the situation of Spanish in Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Cyprus, Croatia, Slovenia, Greece, North Macedonia, Montenegro, and Serbia. The report presentation took place this Wednesday at the headquarters of the Instituto Cervantes in Madrid, led by Carmen Noguero, Secretary General of this Spanish cultural diplomacy institution. A discussion followed with the participation of Marko Kapovic (University of Zadar) and Vita Veselko (University of Ljubljana), co-authors of the study, along with Iñaki Abad, director of the Instituto Cervantes in Belgrade, Héctor Álvarez, from the University of Heidelberg, and Francisco Moreno Fernández, director of the Global Observatory of Spanish. The book highlights, among other data, that the group of potential users of Spanish in this region is estimated at 539,655 people, of whom 507,018 reside in these countries and represent 1.6% of the population (which amounts to 32.9 million inhabitants). “In relation to other regions of Central and Western Europe, these are more modest demolinguistic figures that, nevertheless, reveal the significant growth of Spanish in more peripheral territories, both territorially and politically, compared to Spanish-speaking countries,” the authors of this volume note. The distribution of the Spanish-speaking population is “asymmetrical,” with almost 93% of them living in four countries: Greece, Serbia, Croatia, and Slovenia (the latter being the country with the largest number of Spanish speakers, accounting for 3.4% of the population). “It is worth remembering that this region had an important Sephardic past, especially in Greece, although today, from a demographic point of view, it is a very small community and, in some countries, has practically disappeared due to the Holocaust and migration to Israel,” the Instituto Cervantes recalled. <h5><strong>Education</strong></h5> Likewise, in the section dedicated to education, the document highlights the low institutionalization of Spanish as a foreign language and points out that this language is not included in pre-university education courses or "has only limited eligibility, so the number of students tends to be small." In any case, it emphasizes that the provision of Spanish as a foreign language is usually "concentrated" in the non-formal education subsector, which tends to be "highly fragmented and unstructured." Therefore, the absence of this language in secondary and primary education "is usually compensated for by a wide range of Spanish courses at the university level." The current number of Spanish learners is more than 58,000 students, with more than half of the students (53%) in non-formal education and almost the other half (47%) divided between primary, secondary, and university education. In total, there are more than 6,500 students studying Spanish at universities in Southeast Europe, and more than 2,000 of them are enrolled in Hispanic Studies at the eleven universities in the region that offer them.
