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Sweden's foreign ministry is formally evaluating how the government funds the teaching of Swedish at the university level abroad. The investigation aims to establish if and how the government can market and conduct Swedish language training abroad more efficiently. The report is due by February 2007.
Currently, Swedish instruction is provided at some 200 universities in 43 countries worldwide, but not in Africa. The greatest concentration of university-level Swedish instruction is found in Finland, the United States, Germany, Russia, Poland and the Baltic countries. Swedish is often included in degree programmes in Germanic languages, Scandinavian studies or equivalent. The number of students of the Swedish language at university level is estimated at 50,000 and the number of teachers at 1,000. Instruction is largely provided by non-Swedes. During the past few years, Swedish instruction in the Baltic countries and north-western Russia has undergone particularly rapid expansion.