A new report says that Britons and Hungarians are the worst in Europe when it comes to speaking more than one language. Luxembourg, Latvia and Malta
top the list of those who speak more than one language.
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"Not surprisingly, the best language skills are found in relatively small member states with not widely-spoken national languages," said the study
by the Eurobarometer data agency.
At the top of the class comes Luxembourg, where 99 percent of the tiny duchy's population speaks a foreign language, followed by 93 percent of
Latvians and Maltese who can converse in another tongue.
Further down come the Dutch on 91 percent, Lithuanians on 91 percent and Slovenia on 89 percent.
And at the bottom of the linguistic league come Hungarians, only 29 percent of whom can speak another language, followed closely by 30 percent of
Britons able to converse in another tongue.
Just above them come the Portuguese, Italians and Spanish, 36 percent of whom speak something other than their mother tongue, followed by the Irish on
41 percent and French on 45 percent.
EU education commissioner Jan Figel hailed the finding that younger people speak more foreign languages: 69 percent of 15-24 year-olds can converse in
another tongue, compared to 35 percent of those over the age of 55.
In my opinion thirty percent actually isn't that bad.
I was more surprised at the extremely high numbers in countries like the Netherlands rather than the lower numbers in countries like Britain.
Does any one know of a global list where I can see what the numbers are like in the US, Japan, China, etc..?
