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eubusiness
"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.
Originally posted by DragonsDemesne
As for the Brits, they're probably just lazy and don't bother learning other languages, like Americans or Canadians, most of whom only know English unless they are immigrants or studied a language in school.