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1.29 million children and young people have French lessons in school (symbol image)
Photo: Wolfram Kastl / picture alliance / dpa
Fewer and fewer schoolchildren in Germany are learning French as a foreign language: in the 2021/2022 school year, 1.29 million of the 8.44 million children and young people attending general schools did so.
At 15.3 percent, the proportion is the lowest it has been since the 1994/1995 school year, when it was 15.1 percent.
This is the result of figures from the Federal Statistical Office.
The highest proportion of pupils learning French was 19.1 percent or 1.70 million in the 2009/2010 school year.
English first, Latin before Spanish
Despite the decline over the past ten years, according to the data, French remains the second most common foreign language in general education schools in Germany after English.
A good four out of five students - 82.4 percent or 6.95 million - learned English in the 2021/2022 school year.
6.4 percent or 539,000 children and young people learned Latin in the last school year, closely followed by Spanish with 5.9 percent or 496,000 learners.
According to the statistical office, there are very clear regional differences in how often French is learned and taught as a foreign language.
In Saarland, for example, 51.2 percent of the students took French as a subject.
In Rhineland-Palatinate and Baden-Württemberg it was around a quarter each.
All three federal states in the southwest border on France.
In contrast, only 10.6 percent of pupils in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, 10.7 percent in Saxony-Anhalt and 11.5 percent in North Rhine-Westphalia learned French as a foreign language.
him/AFP
