Archives for December 19th, 2005

Languages being studied in Eastern Europe. View full size. (source)

About a year ago, The Economist ran a story called After Babel, a new common language, which charted the rise of English as Europe’s common language. While not exactly groundbreaking, it’s still a pretty interesting story. They also ran a nice little chart (see above) of what the Easterlings are studying. It turns out that Slovenes, or at least Slovenian secondary schools, are the most English-friendly in the region. According to data taken from the European Commission, eighty-eight percent of Slovenes were learning English at the secondary-school level in 2000. That’s well above countries like the Czech Republic (64%) and Hungary (58%). But English still dominates in the east. (The only exception being Romania, where the most-studied language is French.)

 Anyone who’s been here knows that Slovenes are shockingly excellent at languages, especially English. They’re also strangely modest about it, so if they tell you they "speak a little" then they definitely speak a lot. And if they say they’re "okay" then they’re probably fluent. However, if they just look at with a strange expression, then they probably don’t speak a word of English. That’s fairly rare though. Especially among the young’uns.