Sir

In his Correspondence 'Schools in a third of Spain teach only in minority languages' (Nature 454, 575; 2008), Jose M. Rojo complained about the impossibility of studying in Spanish in one-third of the public schools in Spain. This is, at best, misleading. The Catalan schooling system, for example, does indeed promote the use of Catalan, but native Catalan students are as fluent in Spanish as their monolingual counterparts. The political manifesto Rojo cites to emphasize his point is riddled with contradictions, is not endorsed by any linguists and does not belong in the pages of Nature.

See also Languages: Catalan speakers learn a wider range