Motyl: Opting for Deutsch in Ukraine
Ukrainians are voting with their tongues, and they appear to be voting for Europe. In a little-noticed statistic just released by Ukraine’s Ministry of Education and Science, 52 percent of the country’s fifth-graders chose German as their second foreign language in the forthcoming school year. With another 14 percent of fifth-graders opting for French, 1.6 for Polish, and 1.2 for Spanish, non-Russian European languages accounted for 69 percent of their choices, while Russian accounted for 23—a ratio of three to one in favor of the former.
Since 92 percent of all grade-schoolers already study English as their first foreign language, it’s clear that a linguistic sea change is taking place in Ukraine.