The growth of Spanish and the ‘Lionel Messi effect’

By Professor Carmel Vassallo

The EU’s statistics office, Eurostat, published a news release on September 26, 2014, to mark the European Day of Languages, entitled ‘English, French and German still most common foreign languages studied at lower secondary level in the EU28 in 2012 … but Spanish learning has increased more.’

The news release included a detailed table setting out the changes in foreign language habits in the period 2005-2012 in the 28 countries of the EU and in this short piece I propose to look more closely at these figures.

The very first clear phenomenon to emerge from the data is the primacy of English, which has now reached near-saturation point as regards European schools – no less than 96.7% of students were studying it in 2012, compared to 89.9% seven years earlier. Spain and Latvia are the only two countries to register a very marginal decrease in the proportion studying English.

The overall evolution of French has also been positive, with 34.1% of students studying it in 2012, compared to 30.1% in 2005, but this ‘overall’ picture masks important national differences. Substantial increases in Italy and the FYR of Macedonia contrast with sharp drops in countries like Portugal, Greece, Bulgaria and Malta.

German too posts an increase in the proportion of students studying it, from 19.1% in 2005 to 22.1% in 2012 but here as well behaviour has been erratic. Numbers in the FYR of Macedonia and Poland have more than doubled and there has been strong growth in Slovenia, Slovakia and Croatia. Other countries, such as Belgium, the Czech Republic, Greece, Spain, and Italy have seen a more moderate growth. What is surprising is the sharp drop in the percentage of students studying German in countries like Bulgaria, Denmark, Latvia, Lithuania, Hungary, Finland, Sweden and Iceland.  A clutch of other countries, including Estonia, Ireland, Malta and Norway have posted a moderate decline.

Like we have seen in the cases of French and German, the study of Spanish in the EU overall has increased as well with 12.2% studying it in 2012 compared to 7.4% in 2005. But in contrast to the uneven behaviour of French and German, Spanish is the only one of the three major foreign languages in European schools, setting aside English, to have seen advances in all countries, although some countries clearly stand out.

In Portugal, for example, the proportion of those studying Spanish in the period 2005-2012 has risen from 1.1% to 21.6%; in Norway from 3.5% to 30%; in Italy from 3.6% to 20.5%; and in Sweden from 28.8% to 42.3%. Mid-range gains have been posted by Ireland, where the proportion increased from 7.4% to 13.6% and Malta from 2.4% to 7.4%, while a number of other countries have posted lesser gains. Interesting to note is that a number of countries, including Bulgaria, Denmark, Greece, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg and the FYR of Macedonia do not seem to offer Spanish at all.

Notably absent from the Eurostat table is the United Kingdom but figures for the number of pupils sitting for their General Certificate of Secondary Education in Spanish increased by almost 2,000 to a record high of more than 93,000 this past summer – rocketing up by 50% in a decade and almost three times the total seen in the early 1990s. In the UK, Spanish overtook German a few years ago and GCSE entries in the subject may exceed those for French within a few years as statistics show Spanish is the only language registering increases from year to year. On the flip side, the number of students taking French dropped by three percent, from 177,288 to 168,042, while German entries dropped by just over one percent, from 62,932 to 59,891.

Given this scenario, the question that inevitably poses itself is: what is driving this growth of Spanish in the whole of Europe?

Readers who have read so far may well have started to wonder what Lionel Messi has to do with the study of foreign languages and the quick answer to that one is a lot, according to some insiders in the language teaching business: that Spanish is a global language that is the mother tongue of more people than any other language bar Chinese may be one of the reasons for the growth in Spanish teaching but in an interview with the education editor of The Telegraph on August 21, 2014, Lesley Davies, vice-president of Pearson, which owns the Edexcel Exam Board, declared that “Young people are also more exposed now to Spanish culture, from music, to food, (and) to high profile Spanish-speaking personalities, such as footballer Lionel Messi… It’s no surprise that it’s become the second modern foreign language of choice in the classroom.”

Closer to home, the presence of Spanish in Maltese state schools has increased more than threefold in the space of just seven years, despite teaching practitioners labouring under severe disadvantages compared to teachers of other foreign languages. The language is also increasingly present in the independent and church school sectors which promise to be important areas of growth in the future.

The question clearly must be: Are our state school authorities reacting swiftly enough to this demand from below or is our small nation condemned to lag behind the rest of the EU in this growing trend towards Spanish?