More eurostat stats: learn who is learning which languages in Europe

See it as a pdf here. The press release shows which countries are studying which languages the most, and the second most. Which language they study the most is not interesting: English in almost all cases, French and German in some very rare cases where a French- or German-speaking country is next door. Or, in the case of Ireland and the UK, because English isn't an option.

But which language is studied the second most is interesting, since there is a lot of room to jostle around there.

Second place stats:

(total 27 countries)

German: 10 (Czech Republic, Denmark, Ireland, Hungary, Poland, Slovenia, Slovakia, Croatia, Turkey, Netherlands)
French: 8 (Germany, Greece, Spain, Italy, Cyprus, Luxembourg, Romania, Macedonia)
Russian: 4 (Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania)
Spanish: 4 (France, Sweden, UK, Norway)
Italian: 2 (Malta, Austria)
Dutch: 1 (Belgium)
Swedish: 1 (Finland)
Danish: 1 (Iceland)

Actually Portugal doesn't have anything listed for some reason.

Those numbers were actually for primary and lower secondary school, and on the right it goes into the higher grades. One easy assumption to make would be that those on the left reflect the views of the parents and a more long-term outlook on their children's future, while those on the right reflect something more career-oriented, and based on not just parents but children themselves. The numbers on the right would be more susceptible to current trends.