Second Language - Foreign Language

Foreign Language

In pedagogy and sociolinguistics, a distinction is often made between 'second language' and foreign language, the latter being learned for use in an area where that language is not generally spoken. Arguably, English in countries such as India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, the Philippines, the Scandinavian countries and the Netherlands can be considered a second language for many of its speakers, because they learn it young, speak it fluently, and use it regularly; indeed in southern Asia it is the official language of the courts, government and business.

The same can be said for French in the Arab Maghreb Union, except for Libya, although—as with English in the Scandinavian countries and the Netherlands—French is nominally not an official language in any of these Arabic-speaking countries. In practice, French is widely used in a variety of contexts in these countries, and public signs are normally printed in both Arabic and French. A similar phenomenon exists in the post-Soviet states such as Ukraine, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan, Russian can be considered a second language, and there are large Russophone communities there.

In China (with the exception perhaps of Hong Kong), however, English must be considered a foreign language due to the lack of a number of characteristics, such as historical links, media, opportunities for use, similar vocabulary.

French would be considered a foreign language in Romania, and Moldova as well. This is despite Romanian and French being Romance languages (unlike Chinese and English, which come from two different language families). This is also despite Romania and Moldova being the only two countries in the world where Romanian is an official language at the federal level, Romania's historical links to France, and both Romanian-speaking countries' membership in the Francophonie.

George H. J. Weber, a Swiss businessman and independent scholar, founder of the Andaman Association and creator of the encyclopedic andaman.org Web site, made a report in December 1997 about the number of secondary speakers of the world's leading languages. Weber used the Fischer Weltalmanach of 1986 as his only source] for the L2-speakers data, in preparing the data in the next table. These numbers should be compared with those referred to by Ethnologue, an authoritative site in the linguistics field, however, the data for English as L2 has not been yet reported by Ethnologue.