Maltese students are the EU’s most proficient English speakers outside of Britain.
A Eurostat study, published yesterday, carried out to mark the European Day of Language ranked countries’ performance in language acquisition, fluency and bi-lingualism.
English was the most popular foreign language studied across member states, with 94 per cent of students opting for it. Ireland and the UK were omitted from the study.
As English is recognised as a Maltese national language, Italian remained the most popular foreign option for Maltese students, followed by French, German and Spanish.
Malta was among five countries where German was not the most popular foreign language to be studied.
The study coincided with a series of events organised by the European Commission’s Maltese representation to mark the day.
Forty students from St Ignatius College Secondary School filled the main hall of Europe House, Valletta, to recite poems and songs in a variety of different languages.
The eager students flaunted their skills in Maltese, English and Italian, as well as the less popular German, French and Spanish.
The youngsters exhibited their multilingual skills by swapping between different languages mid-sentence in a short play about learning languages in the classroom.
Education Minister Evarist Bartolo congratulated the students’ willingness to learn and warned of the dangers of limiting their language knowledge.
“In this day and age we cannot afford to limit ourselves when it comes to communication,” he said.
The minister said countless languages had become extinct in recent years, with several others creeping further on to the endangered list.
“With every death of a language a piece of humanity dies too.
“We must protect our humanity by protecting our languages,” he said.
The commission will be hosting a lang-uage and culture fair at The Point shopping centre in Sliema tomorrow.
The fair will include a number of stalls manned by different cultural centres.
EC language officer Brian Buhagiar said the event was aimed at promoting the EU’s 24 languages but also at spreading awareness about another 200 languages and dialects beyond the EU.
“Global languages play a big part in the EU. In many ways they are all EU languages.”