Romanian and British citizens have the lowest foreign language proficiency levels in the EU

Newsroom 27/09/2018 | 07:43

While countries like Sweden, Latvia, Denmark or Lithuania have more than 95 percent of the population speaking at least one foreign language, in Romania only 36 percent of the people are able to do so. The only country with a lower foreign language proficiency is the UK, but the British have the advantage of English, which is spoken in most parts of the world.

High levels of multilingualism, according to Eurostat, are present in Luxembourg, where more than half of the working-age adults reported speaking at least three foreign languages. Knowledge of at least three foreign languages was also high in Finland (45 percent) and Slovenia (38 percent).

In contrast, there were four Member States where half or less than half of the working-age population knew a foreign language: the United Kingdom (35 percent), Romania (36 percent), Hungary (42 percent) and Bulgaria (50 percent).

Eurostat data shows that in 2016, more than 64 percent of Romanians couldn’t speak any foreign language and some of them even have issues with their own language. Of the other 36 percent, 24.7 percent spoke one foreign language, 10.2 percent spoke two foreign languages and 0.9 percent, the lowest level in the EU, spoke three foreign languages.

As a percentage of the population, Danes and Latvians, have the lowest number of people who cannot speak a foreign language – 4.2 percent.