Number crunching: Germany and foreign languages
Jul 8th, 2009 | By Andreas | Category: EnglishI recently came across some interesting statistics on Germans and their foreign language skills. Statista - das Statistikportal (in English: the statistics portal) offers many free statistics on all sorts of things (e.g. the average gas price in Germany) but let's focus on statistics for a minute:
According to this statistics, 63 percent of Germans up from age 16 believe to speak and understand English quite well. Yet, some Germans struggle with the increasing number of times when English terms are included in German conversation. Most important is the fear to simply forget about the German terms while using the English alternative. Every second adult is concerned that Germans have trouble to understand each other correctly by using too many so called Anglizismen (English words). And only one of eight Germans would prefer a Einheitssprache (an official European language). Give it a few decades and our languages will unite by using the same words anyway 
And at least we Germans added some cool ones like Fahrvergnügen, Kindergarten and Zeitgeist.
Do you have any statistics on your country? Let us know in the comments.
Andreas
For Belgium, I found this study of 2007 http://www.cairn.info/revue-reflets-et-perspectives-de-la-vie-economique-2007-1-page-31.htm available to download in PDF). the table is page 36 of the PDF, with complete figures.
As you may know, any statistics in Belgium are made on a region-basis, i.e. Wallonia (99% French-speaking), Flanders (99% Dutch-speaking) and Brussels (officially bilingual). The % is “the rate of people able to speak that language”. There is further detail of trilingualism in the study.
Wallonia:
17% English
11% German
19% Dutch
10% Italian (there is an historic Italian community in the coal region)
57% “French only” !!!! that’s a shame…
Flanders:
52% English
59% French
11% German
Brussels:
96% French
42% English
59% Dutch
The % of people trilingual Fr-Dutch-En are:
Wallonia 7% (!!!)
Flanders 40%
Brussels 31%