How many working-age adults actually speak a second language, and who is most likely to? Eurostat’s “Foreign language skills statistics” article uses the Adult Education Survey (AES) to answer that for the European Union, with data for 2022 and earlier years. This article summarises it. The figures are self-reported, cover adults aged 25 to 64 in EU Member States, do not include the United Kingdom, and are from 2022. They describe people’s own assessment of their skills, not test results, and they are general information.
What counts as a foreign language
Eurostat explains that a language a person knows but does not use at home is treated as foreign. Bilingual people can have more than one native language. In countries with several official languages, such as Belgium with three, a person who speaks only one of them at home counts the others as foreign. People born abroad may treat the language of their country of residence as foreign. Eurostat also warns that countries can apply national preferences when answering the survey, using the example that Slovakian was not counted as foreign in the Czech survey up to 2011.
How many languages adults know
In 2022, 25.3% of working-age adults in the EU said they knew no foreign languages. A further 37.6% knew one, 24.7% knew two and 12.3% knew three or more. Eurostat reports almost no gender gap: 25.5% of men and 25.2% of women knew no foreign language, although a slightly higher share of women knew two (25.5%, 1.6 percentage points above men) or three or more (13.3% against 11.4%).
Country differences were large:
- The share knowing three or more languages peaked in Slovenia (56.3%) and Luxembourg (54.1%), followed by the Netherlands (40.2%) and Finland (38.1%), and was below 4% in Hungary, Greece, Bulgaria and Romania.
- In Romania, Hungary and Bulgaria, more than half of working-age adults knew no foreign language, while ten EU countries had fewer than 10% in that group, led by Slovenia at 4%.
- At least 90% knew a foreign language in ten countries: Slovenia (96.0%), Sweden (95.8%), Estonia (95.5%), Lithuania (95.3%), Latvia (95.0%), Luxembourg (94.5%), the Netherlands (92.9%), Finland (92.1%), Cyprus (91.9%) and Denmark (90.3%).
Eurostat suggests geography and language proximity help explain the high figures in the Nordic, Baltic and some eastern countries, and it says Luxembourg’s figure may partly reflect its three official languages, its education system and the fact that 61.9% of its resident working-age population were born abroad.
Age
Knowing at least one foreign language was more likely for younger, more highly educated and employed adults. In the EU, 84.4% of those aged 25 to 34 knew at least one foreign language, and the share fell in each older group, to 65.0% among those aged 55 to 64. The generation gap was widest where overall knowledge was lower: in Greece, 87.6% of 25 to 34-year-olds knew a foreign language against 51.9% of 55 to 64-year-olds, a 35.7 percentage point gap, with gaps of 29 to 36 points in Poland, Hungary and Romania. Lithuania was the only country with roughly equal shares across the two age groups, and Eurostat suggests that in Lithuania and Latvia, and to a lesser degree Estonia, older people may have learnt Russian while younger people learnt English.
Education
Eurostat reports an education gap too. Across the EU, 90.2% of adults with a high level of education knew at least one foreign language, compared with 71.7% of those with a medium level and 51.2% of those with a low level. Within the medium group, 77.8% of those with a general education knew one, against 73.1% with a vocational orientation. Among people with a low level of education, at least three-quarters knew a foreign language in nine countries, including Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands and Sweden, while fewer than half did in ten, and fewer than 15% in Romania and Hungary.
Employment
By labour status, 78.5% of employed adults knew a foreign language, compared with 65.0% of the unemployed and 63.2% of those outside the labour force. Eurostat notes these figures may support the view that, for some jobs, employers value language skills or promote language learning in staff training, but it presents this as a possibility rather than a finding. In 11 countries, more than 90% of employed adults knew a foreign language, while the share was below 60% in Romania, Bulgaria and Hungary.
Proficiency in the best-known language
The survey also asks about the level reached in a person’s strongest foreign language, and Eurostat stresses that this is self-reported and covers only the strongest language. In 2022, 27.6% of working-age adults who knew at least one foreign language said they were proficient in it, up from 21.6% in 2007. The rise was 1.9, 1.6 and 2.5 percentage points across the three periods in between. In Luxembourg, 68.8% claimed proficiency, and only Latvia (51.5%) and Sweden (51.0%) also passed half. At the other end, Czechia and Italy were both around 15%. Between 2007 and 2022 the proficiency share fell in six of the 22 countries with data, most in Latvia and Slovakia, while Bulgaria, Finland and Cyprus saw relatively rapid increases.
Reading the data carefully
Because answers are self-assessed, they cannot be compared directly with results from a language test, and the article notes that data for some countries may be missing depending on the analysis.
The bottom line
Eurostat’s 2022 figures show that three-quarters of EU working-age adults knew at least one foreign language, with knowledge higher among the young, the highly educated and the employed, and with wide differences between countries. Only about 28% of those who knew a language rated themselves proficient. The findings apply to the EU and are self-reported.
Sources
- Eurostat, “Foreign language skills statistics”, Statistics Explained (ec.europa.eu)