Among these, the lowest share was recorded in Sweden, where less than 4.0 % reported that they did not know any foreign language. In contrast, there were eight EU Member States in 2016 where less than 10.0 % of the population reported that they knew no foreign languages. In 2016, more than half of the adult working-age populations of Bulgaria (50.5 %), Hungary (57.6 %), Romania (64.2 %) and the United Kingdom (65.4 %) reported that they did not know any foreign language.

In contrast, less than 3.0 % of the adult working-age populations of Greece, Hungary, Poland and Romania reported that they knew three or more foreign languages. The share of the adult working-age population who reported that they knew three or more foreign languages peaked at 51.2 % in Luxembourg, while the next highest shares were recorded in Finland (44.9 %) and Slovenia (37.7 %). The extent of multilingualism differed considerably between the EU Member States. More than half of the adult working-age population in Luxembourg knew three or more foreign languages The following specificity in particular has been reported to Eurostat about the national collection of foreign languages: Slovakian was not considered as a foreign language in the Czech survey up to the AES 2011, while Czech is considered as a foreign language in all waves of the Slovakian survey. It is important to note that - in spite of the existence of these rules to be applied when collecting the AES data - countries may also implement national preferences when building their questionnaires. When the survey is conducted this person should reply that Russian is their ‘mother tongue’, while (for the purpose of this article) English would be considered as a foreign language (given the respondent had some knowledge of the English language). Many of these people may well have a different mother tongue from the official language(s) where they are resident, for example, a person who has Russian as their mother tongue living in the United Kingdom. In a similar vein, a relatively large proportion of people living in the EU were not born in the Member State where they are resident. However, it is not necessarily the case that these official languages coincide with the ‘mother tongue(s)’ of the respondent and if they only speak one of these at home, then the others are considered (for the purpose of this article) as foreign languages. Note there are cases among the EU Member States where there is more than one ‘official language’ - for example, in Belgium there are three (German, French and Dutch). In bilingual homes, the language of either the father or of the mother could be the most dominant, in the sense that it is used for in-house communication, or it could be that both the languages of the mother and father are used, in which case the respondent has more than one ‘mother tongue’. They are subsequently asked to provide information on other languages that they may know.Ī ‘mother tongue’ is understood to mean the first language learned at home in childhood and still understood by the individual at the time of the adult education survey (AES). When conducting the adult education survey (AES) respondents are asked to name the language(s) they use as their mother tongue. Interest in foreign language skills centres on the ability of Europeans to communicate in an efficient way: with information collected in relation to the most commonly used languages and levels of language competence/skill. However, the share of women who knew two foreign languages (22.1 %) was 2.2 percentage points higher than that for men, and the share of women who knew three or more foreign languages (8.9 %) was also higher than that recorded for men (7.9 %). In 2016, a slightly higher share of men did not know any foreign languages or knew only one foreign language (both 36.1 %) compared with the corresponding share for women (34.8 % and 34.3 % respectively). A similar proportion (35.2 %) reported that they knew one foreign language, while just over one fifth (21.0 %) knew two foreign languages, and fewer than one tenth (8.4 %) of all working-age adults knew three or more foreign languages.Īn analysis by sex reveals that there was almost no gender gap in relation to foreign language skills. In 2016, over one third (35.4 %) of the working-age adults (defined here as 25–64 year-olds) in the EU-28 reported that they did not know any foreign languages. Around two thirds of working-aged adults in the EU knew at least one foreign language

Bilingual vs monolingual statistics