The Decline of French in Education Across Europe, the Middle East, and Africa

In this study, the role French maintains in education is assessed across Europe, Africa, and the Middle East. Statistics on the numbers of L1 users, those who have French as an additional language, as well as other demographic data, are used to chart trends in acquisition patterns across these three regions. The decline in the learning of traditional additional languages is juxtaposed with Englishization. What languages are utilized in school as the language of instruction, as well as what foreign languages are promoted in educational systems, has a profound impact on patterns of second-language acquisition. Here, in all three regions, English is gaining ground at the expense of other languages in primary and secondary school, as well as in higher education, and one result of this historic shift in the acquisition of additional languages is that English is now significantly reducing the importance of French in Francophone Africa.