Special Eurobarometer 386: Europeans and their Languages

The survey provides information about the citizens' attitudes towards foreign languages and multilingualism within the European Union.It looks at the ways in which Europeans learn and use foreign languages, exploring their motivations and potential barriers to learning.It also gauges their opinion on the role of interpretation and translation in relation to European institutions and various areas across society.
The Commission’s first ever Communication on Multilingualism “A New Framework Strategy for Multilingualism”, adopted in November 2005 and now superseded by the 2008 Strategy, set out three basic strands to the EU’s policy in this area:
- underlining the major role that languages and multilingualism play in the European economy, and finding ways to develop this further
- encouraging all citizens to learn and speak more languages, in order to improve mutual understanding and communication
- ensuring that citizens have access to EU legislation, procedures and information in their own language

The results by volumes are distributed as follows:

• Volume A: Countries
• Volume AA: Groups of countries
• Volume A' (AP): Trends
• Volume AA' (AAP): Trends of groups of countries
• Volume B: EU/socio-demographics
• Volume B' (BP) : Trends of EU/ socio-demographics
• Volume C: Country/socio-demographics

Researchers may also contact GESIS - Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences: https://www.gesis.org/eurobarometer