English becomes Europe’s second language according to survey
Two thirds of people on the continent can hold a conversation in English, and in every country outside Britain and Ireland it is the first foreign language taught in secondary school. English is now, in practice, Europe's second language, and the numbers are not close.
The figures come from a Eurostat survey of language use and language teaching across the European Union. It found 66 per cent of respondents wanted to speak English, 20 per cent German and just 12 per cent French. "English is far ahead of any other as the first choice as a foreign language," the report stated. "Behind English, people are choosing to learn German and Russian. Knowledge of French as a foreign language is low."
A bad week in Paris
The timing was cruel. France had just lost a bid to have French made the sole working language of the EU institutions in Brussels, an argument advanced on the grounds that the language is more precise than its rivals. Legal French does carry a formidable tradition, and much of the Union's early jurisprudence was drafted in it. But precision was never the deciding factor. Numbers were.
French remains one of the three procedural languages of the European Commission alongside English and German, and it is still the working language of the Court of Justice, where deliberations are held in French to this day. What has drained away is French as the language of the corridor, the coffee break and the draft email. Enlargement did that. The countries that joined from 2004 onward taught English, not French, and they arrived with officials who had learned it.
What the school data really shows
The most spoken languages in Europe are not the ones being learned. Native speaker totals still put German first, followed by French and Italian. But the teaching data runs the other way, and teaching data is a forecast. If English is the compulsory first foreign language for schoolchildren in Poland, Spain, Sweden and Greece alike, then the working language of European business in twenty years is already decided.
- English is the first foreign language studied in secondary schools in every EU member state except Ireland
- German and Russian sit well behind, and their strength is regional rather than continental
- French demand is concentrated in Belgium, Luxembourg and parts of southern Europe
- Second and third foreign languages are increasingly optional, which compresses everything into English
Language planners in several capitals have argued that this is a problem rather than a convenience. If everyone learns the same second language, the pool of people who can work between Polish and Portuguese, or Finnish and Greek, shrinks. Those are exactly the combinations the Union's own institutions need.
The billion-pound translation bill
Which brings the argument to money. The survey prompted fresh calls for the EU to cut back the roughly one billion pounds a year it spends translating official documents into its recognised languages, 23 at the time of the report and 24 today. Every regulation, every directive, every parliamentary question is rendered into all of them. The Directorate-General for Translation is one of the largest translation operations on earth.
The case for cutting it is obvious and, on its face, persuasive. If two thirds of Europeans read English, why pay to produce a Maltese version of a technical annexe on fisheries quotas that perhaps forty people will open?
The case against is constitutional. EU law is directly binding on citizens, and a citizen cannot be bound by a text they cannot read. A Latvian farmer subject to a regulation has the right to read that regulation in Latvian. The moment the Union stops publishing in a member state's language, it has quietly told that state's citizens that their language is not a language of law. That is not a budget question. It is a legitimacy question, and it is why every proposal to trim the language regime has died.
What actually gets translated
The practical compromise already exists, and it is less tidy than either side admits. Legally binding texts get the full treatment. Working documents, drafts, internal memos and most of the material that officials actually handle day to day circulate in English, and increasingly only in English. Interpreting at meetings has been rationed, with delegations asked to name the languages they genuinely need rather than the ones they are entitled to.
The result is a two-tier system: full multilingualism for the law, English for the work. It costs less than critics claim, roughly the price of a cup of coffee per citizen per year by the Commission's own reckoning, and it satisfies nobody entirely.
Where this leaves the learners
For anyone deciding what to study, the survey is a blunt instrument. English is the default and no longer a differentiator, which is precisely why the value is drifting to the second choice. Recruiters in Brussels and Berlin will not be impressed that a candidate speaks English. They will be impressed that a candidate speaks English and Romanian, or English and Greek.
The full picture of the Union's language regime is set out in the official EU language rules, and the survey data sits alongside the long-running Eurobarometer series. Practical debate about which second language is actually worth the years now happens somewhere less formal, in places like r/languagelearning, where the answer usually depends on where you intend to live.