High percentage of Valencians do not understand English, study reveals

ACCORDING to a recent study, a high percentage of Valencians do not understand English, while a low percentage can speak it.

According to the National Institute of Statistics (INE), 73 per cent of Valencians do not understand English at all, while only 12 per cent can speak it well.

The Survey of Essential Characteristics of the Population and Dwellings study showed that although young people in Valencia can recite certain pop culture phrases, 73.2 per cent of those under 20 do not understand English at all.

The INE study also revealed that of people aged between 40 and 59, 81.5 per cent do not understand English, while 68 per cent of people aged 20-39 do not understand the language either.

Seventy per cent of people in the study admitted that they could not read anything in English. While only two in ten said they were good readers of the language.

Those who could write in English were even lower.

Nine out of every ten people living in Valencia said they did not know how to speak English at all.

By region, Valencians led with 73.2 per cent, with Galicians (74 per cent) and the Basque Country, Balearic Islands and Catalonia (over 70 per cent).

Fifty-four per cent of young people from Spain’s Madrid reportedly did not understand English at all, which was the lowest percentage in the study.

By provinces, 248,383 young people in Alicante admitted that they did not understand English at all, compared with 90,511 who say they understand it with difficulty or well.

In Castelló, 77.6 per cent of its young people know no English at all (83,783 in total). In the province of Valencia, there are 340,459 young people who do not understand English and 130,000 who speak it well or with difficulty.

However, it is not just the English language that Valencians struggled with according to the study.

The data showed that 42 per cent of young people cannot speak Valencian well and almost half of them do not write correctly, as reported by Levante-EMV.

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