asked the Secretary of State for Defence (1) how many officers and Ministry of Defence personnel are trained each year to obtain a certified proficiency in Arabic;(2) how many officers and Ministry of Defence personnel are trained each year to obtain a certified proficiency in Portuguese;(3) how many officers and Ministry of Defence personnel are trained each year to obtain a certified proficiency in Polish;(4) how many officers and Ministry of Defence personnel are trained each year to obtain a certified proficiency in Persian;
(5) how many officers and Ministry of Defence personnel are trained each year to obtain a certified proficiency in Japanese;
(6) how many officers and Ministry of Defence personnel are trained each year to obtain a certified proficiency in Chinese;
(7) how many officers and Ministry of Defence personnel are trained each year to obtain a certified proficiency in German;
(8) how many officers and Ministry of Defence personnel are trained each year to obtain a certified proficiency in Italian;
(9) how many officers and Ministry of Defence personnel are trained each year to obtain a certified proficiency in French;
(10) how many officers and Ministry of Defence personnel are trained each year to obtain a certified proficiency in Spanish;
(11) how many officers and Ministry of Defence personnel are trained each year to obtain a certified proficiency in Russian;
(12) how many officers and Ministry of Defence personnel are trained each year to obtain a certified proficiency in Czech.
The numbers of Service officers and Ministry of Defence civilians who receive language training to a certified level of proficiency vary from year to year. Following are the figures which are immediately available for 1976:
| Language | Service Officers | Ministry of Defence Civilians | |
| Arabic | … | 88 | — |
| Chinese | … | 9 | 1 |
| Czech | … | — | — |
| French | … | 55 | 23 |
| German | … | Approximately 1,270 | 16 |
| Italian | … | 7 | — |
| Japanese | … | 5 | — |
| Persian | … | 3 | — |
| Polish | … | 2 | — |
| Portuguese | … | 5 | 1 |
| Russian | … | 40 | 2 |
| Spanish | … | 8 | 4 |
asked the Secretary of State for Defence (1) how many people working on defence sales have passed a Civil Service proficiency examination in Portuguese;(2) how many people working on defence sales have passed a Civil Service proficiency examination in Arabic;(3) how many people working on defence sales have passed a Civil Service proficiency examination in Persian.
None in the Defence Sales Organisation.
asked the Secretary of State for Defence how many of the military/naval/air force attachés serving in Iran, Brazil, Saudi Arabia, the USSR, Indonesia, Japan, China, Korea, Egypt, France, Syria, Iraq, Israel, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Italy and West Germany have passed a Civil Service examination in the language of the country to which they are accredited.
18; and a further four have passed an examination set by the Armed Forces.