Mr Marcelino Ansorena, Ambassador of Spain to Nigeria, said that his country would invest in educational and cultural projects with a view to promoting the speaking of the Spanish language in Nigeria.
Ansorena told the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) in Abuja on Wednesday that investment in teaching and learning of Spanish had become important to encourage people to interact internationally through the language.
He said that the Spain government was conscious about the considerable growth in demand for learning Spanish, therefore the investment in speaking of the language.
According to the envoy, Spanish is a native language of more than 500 million people in the world; only in United States of America 60 million people use Spanish.
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“In few years one in every four persons should be able to speak Spanish as native language, which is one reason we want Nigerians to learn Spanish as a native language.
“We want to reinforce the author of Spanish; we have done many things in the past but we want strategic and structural plan to achieve this.
“The teaching of Spanish in Nigeria already exists, but we will hardly achieve growth unless we organise our cultural agenda more to offer educational and learning of the language.
“We are organising academic programme sessions in 2020 in Nigeria that consist specialized training for teachers and students on Spanish, to promote the speaking of the language,” he said.
The ambassador revealed that the embassy would partner with the Spanish institute to teach the language and conduct the language exam as official diploma course for international relations.
He mentioned that over 100 students had so far written the Spanish exam since 2014.
“This is important because those with good medium of Spanish should have official accredited level to teach the language in future.
“We have our own Library where we promote the edition and printing of Spanish books; this is to enable us promote our culture and not just the language,” the envoy added. (NAN)