Greek women they know Foreign languagesand mostly English. Only one in three does not know one, but the percentage is related to older residents. It is also well known that teenagers in Greece are in a hurry to “unravel” their foreign language diplomas before the second high school and start intensive preparation for the general Greek exams. But is it easy for them to practice the foreign language they claim to know in conversation with a foreigner? Can they read journalistic text from foreign press on the Internet? Can they study a foreign book?

In a tweet yesterday, Turkish political scientist Soner Çağaptay provided impressive data on multilingualism in Europe. Scandinavians and Baltics are far ahead of all other Europeans. Only 3.4% of Swedes do not know at least one foreign language. Next come the Danes, Lithuanians and Latvians, countries where only 4% of the inhabitants do not know a single foreign language. The next very good percentage is 5.5% of Luxembourgers, while Estonia, Norway, Finland and Switzerland are around 8%. It is followed by Slovakia with 11.8% and Austria and the Netherlands each with about 14%. Every fifth Serb and German does not know a foreign language, while the percentage of Croats is 26%. The Portuguese have 31%, while the inhabitants of North Macedonia and Poland have about 32%. Three out of ten Greeks (33.5%) do not know a single foreign language, close to Italians with 34%.

The Scandinavians and the Baltics are impressively ahead of the rest of the Europeans.

A large percentage of countries with residents who do not know a foreign language, but speak a language that has spread in other countries – in France 39.9%, in Spain 45.8% and in the UK 65.4% – show that when we speak foreign language, we should not think only of English, as many people probably thought. It is also possible that the inhabitants of the Baltics and the Balkans know some language of a country that has close cultural ties with their own.

The question is whether the inhabitants can function by speaking the foreign language they know, or if they just mumble the words to understand the basics. Significantly, Jagaptay tweeted that it is easy for citizens who do not speak English to be deceived by his country’s controlled media. Conversation with “K” on this occasion, the rector of the Panteillon University Christina Kouluri he stated that “it is no doubt important that a large percentage of Greeks speak English, but we might ask ourselves what level of knowledge they have and what level of information they have access to.” Most children learn English through tutoring until the age of 15, sometimes they get a diploma, but then they do not have the opportunity to develop their English. So it remains fruitless knowledge that they don’t use or improve on. On the Internet, they probably prefer Greek websites and use English at an elementary level.” And he added: “On the other hand, the Greeks learn – and have always learned – foreign languages, because the Greek language is a “minority” language at the global level, spoken by several million people. On the contrary, global language communities like Spanish have a kind of self-sufficiency and do not need to know another language to communicate and receive information.”