Eurostat: More than 90% of high school pupils in Bulgaria studying English
English is the most commonly-studied foreign language among high school pupils in Bulgaria, according to statistics published by European Union statistics agency Eurostat.
In 2019, English was top at 90.5 per cent, followed by German, 34.3 per cent, Russian 23.9 per cent, French 10.3 per cent and Spanish 10 per cent, Eurostat said.
That year, 59 per cent of pupils in upper secondary general education in the EU were studying two or more foreign languages.
Across the EU countries, all pupils in upper secondary general education studied two or more foreign languages in Luxembourg and France.
Estonia, Romania, Czech Republic and Finland also had a large proportion of pupils studying two or more languages (all 99 per cent), followed closely by Slovakia (98 per cent), Croatia (95 per cent) and Slovenia (92 per cent).
In contrast, in Greece, only one per cent of pupils in upper secondary general education studied two or more foreign languages in 2019. Low shares of language learners were also registered in Portugal (six per cent), Ireland (12 per cent), Italy (25 per cent) and Spain (27 per cent).
In 2019, English was the most commonly studied foreign language at upper secondary general education level in the EU, with 96 per cent of pupils learning it.
Spanish ranked second (26 per cent), followed by French (22 per cent), German (20 per cent) and Italian (three per cent).
In addition, Russian was the non-EU language most commonly learned in the EU (three per cent), especially in Estonia (68 per cent) and Latvia (57 per cent), followed by Lithuania (30 per cent) and Bulgaria (24 per cent), Eurostat said.
(Photo: Simon Cataudo/sxc.hu)
Please support independent journalism by clicking on the orange button below. For as little as three euro a month or the equivalent in other currencies, you can support The Sofia Globe via patreon.com:
