Euroeans and their Languages

Mr. Newman provided an interesting Link about Europeans and their Languages at yahoo groups. It is a summary of a fieldwork conducted from November-December 2005 of the European Commission. I think the three main themes focused, are incredibly important in our multilingual society nowadays. They are:

• The long-term objective for all EU citizens to speak two languages in addition to their mother tongue
• Lifelong language learining starting from a very early age
• The importance of education

Being a language learner I feel that these aims are the starting point for a well working multicultural and multilingual Europa.
Some of the results the survey provided were very informative, some even sobering. For example 44 % admit not knowing any other language than their mother tongue. That's quite a high number, don't you think?
English is the most commonly used language in the EU, followed by German, French and Italian. So I guess studying English and Italian was a good choice, at least when I remain in Europe.
It is also mentioned that education is the key and in this point I think Austria is still miles behind. There must be a lot more done in the educational sector to achieve the goal of mother tongue+two. I hope that my children will once have the opportunity to study as many languages as they want. (But to be honest, that will still take a while - with the children I mean (-;

All in all, it's a very informative article and if you haven't read it yet, go for it and see why you are studying languages and why you made the right desicion.