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What are the two most studied foreign languages in your country? (excluding English)?
To my amusement, when I googled for this in Australia, I found that I know the researchers that came up with the latest research on this. The latest research I found was 10 years ago, though (which is why I know them); and I don’t think the numbers will have stayed the same.
http://research.acer.edu.au/cgi/…
As of 10 years ago:
- Japanese: 333k
- Italian: 322k
- Indonesian: 210k
- French: 207k
- German: 127k
- Chinese: 81k
French and German are the inherited elite education languages (they’re what I did). The newspapers have been bemoaning the fall in Asian language enrolments; so Japanese and Indonesian will have dropped; Chinese as a community language will have risen and Italian fallen.
From Languages in Victorian schools, the most popular taught languages in Australia now are French, German, Indonesian and Japanese. That means Italian has collapsed as a community language taught in schools, and Chinese hasn’t broken through yet (which surprises me).
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