2nd Most Taught Foreign Language in European Secondary Schools

What’s the 2nd most taught foreign language in European secondary schools?

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We’ve looked before at the share of secondary school students that study a foreign language. On this map, we’re going to look at which language is the second most taught foreign language. Why focus on the second most taught language and not the most taught language in general? Well, because it would be a pretty boring map. English is the most taught foreign language in all, but four countries on this map: Flanders (Belgium), Ireland, Luxembourg and the UK. In these four places, French is the most taught foreign language.

Why are Flanders and Wallonia separated? The data source, Eurostat, offers separate data for Flanders and Wallonia. As there is a clear divide between the Dutch and French speaking areas of Belgium, I thought it would be better to show the data for Flanders and Wallonia instead of the whole country. Although there are other countries in Europe with areas that have a different official language (e.g. Finland), Eurostat did not have data on that.

There are three languages that are clearly the most taught languages after English: French, German and Spanish. French is mostly the second most taught language in Western and Southern Europe. For German, it’s mostly in Eastern Europe. Both French and German are in the top 3 of most taught languages in secondary school in almost every European country.