Foreign Language Skills in Europe: Country Rankings, Age Gaps and Proficiency Rates

If you are a job seeker thinking about working across borders in Europe, understanding the language landscape of your target country matters. Here is what Eurostat's adult education survey data, collected from working-age adults in 2022, shows.

How multilingual is Europe?

English is, by the source's own account, far and away the most widely-spoken foreign language across the EU. Beyond that, the overall picture varies considerably.

In 2022, 84.4% of EU adults aged 25-34 knew at least 1 foreign language. That share fell to 65.0% among those aged 55-64. For the youngest adults surveyed, those aged 18-24, the figure was 87.3% - 12.6 percentage points higher than the working-age group as a whole.

Gender made almost no difference: 25.5% of men knew no foreign language, compared with 25.2% of women. The bigger dividers are age, education level and the country where you grew up.

Where in Europe are people most (and least) multilingual?

Ten EU countries reported that at least 90% of their working-age population knew at least 1 foreign language in 2022:

• Slovenia - 96.0%
• Sweden - 95.8%
• Estonia - 95.5%
• Lithuania - 95.3%
• Latvia - 95.0%
• Luxembourg - 94.5%
• Netherlands - 92.9%
• Finland - 92.1%
• Cyprus - 91.9%
• Denmark - 90.3%

Slovenia also leads on knowing multiple languages: 56.3% of its working-age adults knew 3 or more foreign languages. Luxembourg followed at 54.1%, then the Netherlands at 40.2% and Finland at 38.1%.

Luxembourg's position reflects a specific local context: 3 official languages, a school system that teaches Luxembourgish, German and French at primary level with English added at secondary level, and a large foreign-born population - Eurostat records that 61.9% of Luxembourg's working-age residents were born abroad in 2022.

At the other end, in Romania, Hungary and Bulgaria, more than half the working-age population said they did not know any foreign language at all.

The generation gap

The difference between younger and older workers is largest in countries where overall language rates are low.

In Greece, 87.6% of those aged 25-34 knew at least 1 foreign language, compared with 51.9% of those aged 55-64 - a gap of 35.7 percentage points. Poland, Hungary and Romania showed similarly large generational differences, in the range of 29-36 percentage points.

Lithuania stands out as an exception: Eurostat notes that older generations there are more likely to have learned Russian, while younger ones learned English, keeping the overall rate relatively consistent across age groups.

Education level and employment status

Language skills track closely with education. EU-wide in 2022:

• Adults with a high level of education: 90.2% knew at least 1 foreign language
• Adults with a medium level of education: 71.7%
• Adults with a low level of education: 51.2%

In Croatia, Poland, Hungary and Romania, the gap between the most and least educated reached 60-81 percentage points.

Employment status also correlates with language knowledge. In 2022, 78.5% of employed adults knew a foreign language, compared with 65.0% of the unemployed and 63.2% of those outside the labour force. Eurostat notes this may reflect employer demand for language skills or workplace language training for staff.

Proficiency: knowing a language vs. speaking it well

Knowing a language and speaking it with confidence are different things. Across the EU, 27.6% of working-age adults who knew at least 1 foreign language rated themselves as proficient in their strongest one - up from 21.6% recorded in the 2007 survey.

Proficiency levels varied widely by country (all figures self-reported):

• Luxembourg - 68.8%
• Latvia - 51.5%
• Sweden - 51.0%
• Czechia and Italy - around 15% (Eurostat describes these figures as approximate)

Younger workers were more likely to claim proficiency: 34.9% of those aged 25-34 did so, compared with 20.4% of those aged 55-64. Among adults with a high level of education, 38.4% claimed proficiency in their strongest foreign language.

For anyone moving between European labour markets, the data suggests that your country of origin, your age group and your education level all shape both how many languages you can bring to a role and how confidently you can use them.

Source: Eurostat adult education survey (AES), 2022 data.