About

language knowledge /eu exclusively uses data from the Europeans and their languages Special Eurobarometer survey from the European Commission. Eurobarometers are a collection of cross-country public opinion surveys conducted regularly on behalf of the EU Institutions since 1974. Special Eurobarometer surveys are in-depth thematic studies relevant to the activities of the European institutions.

The Europeans and their languages Special Eurobarometers were fielded in February / March 2012 (Special Eurobarometer 243, published in 2012) and September / October 2023 (Special Eurobarometer 386, published in 2024) and constitute the most up to date, authoritative and comprehensive statistics on language knowledge across Europe. The website displays data from both editions - 2012 and 2024 - of the survey for comparison purposes. Because of changes in the member states over the past decade (new member states, and Brexit), as well as the addition or removal of languages from the survey, not all countries and languages are available for both years.

For ideas, questions or corrections feel free to email me at jvanparys@gmail.com

In early 2012 and again in autumn of 2023, more then 25,000 people all over Europe above the age of 15 were surveyed for the Special Eurobarometer; roughly one thousand per European Union member state.

In the survey, respondents are asked to list their mother-tongues (Native speakers) and which other languages they speak well enough to have a conversation, and how well they speak those other languages: basic, good or very good? In line with other studies, language knowledge /eu considers a person is speaks one of those other languages if they state their knowledge of it is good or very good (Foreign speakers). This explains why the numbers on this website do not match the numbers in the Special Eurobarometer report relating to "respondents who say they speak a language well enough in order to be able to have a conversation" - those numbers include "basic" speakers, while this website does not. The "Speakers" tab on the website allows you to toggle between all speakers (Native and Foreign), Native speakers and Foreign speakers (which are good and very good speakers of languages they are able to have a conversation in). The numbers shown always capture the percentage of the population of the country.

You will also notice a second toggle: Age groups. I created three age groups: 15 to 34, 35 and 54, and 55+. This allows you to see how language knowledge has evolved between generations.

Finally, you may be wondering how reliable the data is... This is obviously survey data based on self-assessment, so what it says is only as good as the ability of people to self-assess their knowledge of a language, and the sample composition. I've noticed that some small languages may be over-represented in some countries but overall I've found that results from the Eurobarometer language survey match more in-depth local surveys, are consistent with other European language learning surveys, including the first European survey on language competences, and tend to be correlated with compulsory school languages in countries.

People like Martin have done such nice things with demographic and migration data. So when the European Commission published a Special Eurobarometer survey on languages, I thought it would be fun to do something interactive with language data to visualize language dynamics in Europe: which languages are growing in popularity, which languages are most spoken in each country, which countries are lagging behind in language skills, etc.

Thanks to @pvpbrussels, @odemarne and @madewulf for their feedback as I was working on the site.

I'd also like to thank Anna Sole Mana at the European Commission for making the respondent-level survey data available.

Visualising Europe’s Languages · Open Knowledge Foundation blog
How fluent are we? · Low Countries blog
Have a new look at data on language knowledge · European Commission, EU Languages and Language policy
Czechs' English the worst in the EU · aktualne.cz (in Czech)
Slovaks and European languages skills · aktualne.sk (in Slovak)
How many Europeans speak English, or other languages? · Quora
How many people speak English in Poland? · Planet English (in Polish)
Language Knowledge, en un par de clics · Documentación aplicada a la Traducción, Universidad de Granada (in Spanish)
El català, setena llengua amb més nous parlants d'Europa · VilaWeb.cat (in Catalan)
Stop povinnému dabingu v Česku · stopdabingu.cz (Stop Compulsory Dubbing Petition, in Czech)
Come spingere gli italiani a studiare l’inglese? · LINKIESTA.it (in Italian)
Tweets about languageknowledge.eu · Twitter

The survey data was analysed using the Pandas library in Python, and the website was created using SvelteKit and is hosted on Vercel.