Britain is Europe's foreign languages dunce, study shows

Britain really is the languages "dunce" of Europe. Research to be published in the new year will show that fewer people in Britain can speak a second language than anywhere else in the continent. Only one in three Britons can speak a second language - compared with 98 per cent in Luxembourg, which tops the table.

Britain really is the languages "dunce" of Europe. Research to be published in the new year will show that fewer people in Britain can speak a second language than anywhere else in the continent. Only one in three Britons can speak a second language - compared with 98 per cent in Luxembourg, which tops the table.

The report also goes on to dispel as a myth the argument that it does not really matter because everyone else speaks English. It warns that - while English is the most commonly spoken second language in Europe - it is "far from having the all-pervasive status in Europe often attributed to it".

In some countries, more people speak Russian, German or French as a second language than English.

The findings come as the teaching of languages in British schools is in crisis. A steep decline in its take-up as a subject has been recorded since it was officially axed from the compulsory national curriculum for 14 to 16-year-olds.

Two-thirds of state schools no longer offer it as a compulsory subject. Only in the independent sector is it still on the timetable of every school.

The report, based on data from the European Union, which interviewed 1,000 people in 28 European states, aggregates the non-mother tongue skills of each country by adding the percentage who say they speak French to the percentage saying they speak English, German and so on. The UK is bottom of the pile with a ranking of 34 while Luxembourg is top with 244 followed by the Netherlands with 159 and Denmark with 154. The nearest to the UK are Hungary with a ranking of 35 and Ireland with 39.

The report is to be published by the Centre for Information on Language Teaching, the UK national resource centre for language teachers, in its 2005 handbook.

While it confirms that English is the most commonly spoken second language, it shows that only 10 per cent of people in Turkey, 13 per cent in Slovenia and 14 per cent in Bulgaria and Hungary speak it. Even in France the figure is only 32 per cent.

In Luxembourg 85 per cent speak French and 81 per cent speak German while just 46 per cent speak English.

"These figures show that English, while important, is far from having the all-pervasive status in Europe often attributed to it," it concludes.

"In Romania as many people speak French as English. French is also strong in Italy and Portugal. German is widely spoken in central Europe and the Baltic countries, with more Czechs and Slovaks speaking German than English.

"In Slovenia, Poland and Hungary, almost as many people speak German as English. German is also very widely known in Luxembourg, the Netherlands and Denmark." It goes on to warn of the growing importance of Russian as a European language with the accession of so many former east European states into the European Union.

"With the access of the new countries, Russian achieves significance as an important lingua franca," it says.

The findings will fuel a campaign by language teachers to ensure the subject becomes a central part of the curriculum as a result of the Government's White Paper on education for students aged 14 to 19, expected in February.

The inquiry into exam reform by the former chief schools inspector Mike Tomlinson suggested a foreign language should become a compulsory part of new-style vocational qualifications such as leisure and tourism. He also recommends that no one should be awarded a distinction in the intermediate diploma that he proposes as a replacement for GCSEs without showing evidence of breadth of study, such as languages.