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From: Christian Weisgerber <naddy@mips.inka.de>
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: Re: "Europeans and their languages" (2024)
Date: Sat, 28 Dec 2024 19:46:08 -0000 (UTC)
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On 2024-12-28, Helmut Richter <hr.usenet@email.de> wrote:

>> https://europa.eu/eurobarometer/surveys/detail/2979
>
> I find the numbers hard to believe.

Well, it's self-reported, so I guess you get the people who think
serving years of foreign language class punishment entitles them
to be classified as speaking that language, as well as the other
end with quasi-native speakers who self-deprecatingly say that
they're not very good at the language.

> One in six people who live in Germany speaks enough French to
> have a conversation in French? I think I have only met the five
> others.

I've definitely met Germans who are fluent in French.  More generally,
you don't really know what languages people speak until you observe
them doing so or, conversely, they studiously avoid any actual use
of a language they claim to master.

> One in nine Europeans has four languages at his 
> disposal for talking with other people? I have never met one of these.

The perils of geographic bias.  I guess you don't (knowingly) run
across many Luxembourgers down there in Munich.  At the University
of Kaiserslautern, we had a small community of Luxembourgish students.
I only discovered some of them one by one when I accidentally caught
them speaking Luxembourgish amongst each other or French to our
African students.  In addition to Luxembourgish, German, and French,
they could also muster the usual English as foreign language.
Désirée Nosbusch doing her thing at Eurovision isn't as unusual
as you might think:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EipoCiMttWY

A number of years ago I had lunch at a restaurant in Piran, part
of Slovenia's tiny slice of Mediterranean coast and a very touristy
place, and the waiter wanted to show off by speaking to each guest
in their native language.  Between our international table and the
neighboring ones we came to, I forgot, maybe ten languages combined?
Which he handled with aplomb.

I suspect a lot of the four-language Europeans are from immigrant
communities, so you have parent language, local language, English,
plus one other foreign language.  And while I doubt there are enough
to move the needle in this survey, there are also immigrants from
a more or less bilingual background, think Albanian/Serbo-Croatian,
Ukrainian/Russian, Arabic/French.

-- 
Christian "naddy" Weisgerber                          naddy@mips.inka.de