Linguistic barriers hold up Slovakia's march towards EU enlargement

The 11 official languages of the European Union already make for quite a mouthful, but when a fresh batch of member states joins in May - not only the official EU translators but also European citizens will also have to cope with more foreign languages. And Slovakia is particularly concerned that its citizens are not doing too well when foreign languages.

One of the things Slovakia could face after its entry to the EU is more foreigners in the country. However, such visitors could have a problem getting around according to a recent survey. It states that only about 30% of the population can communicate in an EU foreign language. Marian Velsic, an analyst from the Institute of Public Issues, says that they also discovered that language knowledge has not changed throughout the last 5 years.

"There are still the same group of people that learn and master languages and the ones that don't. The largest group of people who have mastered foreign languages are university- educated people."

As Marian Velsic says, one reason for the survey's outcome might be that people underestimate themselves and don't admit the fact that they do know the language at least to a certain extent. According to Danica Bakosova from the Education Ministry Slovaks are rather shy.

"Even if a Slovak is quite good at something, he will not be very sure about himself. There is little self-confidence. We should somehow overcome this hurdle."

Learning foreign languages in Slovakia is compulsory from third grade in elementary schools. English is the most commonly taught language. After that come German, French and Spanish. Danica Bakosova continues:

"We must not forget about Russian. And there is another language that is rather rare. It is Italian. Very, very small traces of some exotic languages can be seen, such as Japanese, but it's rather for pleasure."

Anna Butasova, head of the department of foreign languages at Commenius University says that Hungary, Poland and also the Czech republic invest a lot more money into teaching foreign languages during compulsory education.

"Slovakia doesn't have a clear language policy and the losses are unimaginable. No other subject, except languages can students take up from scratch at the secondary level, although they already studied the language at basic school. This is a very common phenomenon that needs a systematic solution."

The Education Ministry is already preparing changes and improvements in the system. The will to study foreign languages is reflected in the number of adults and university students who take self paid language courses. Many of them want to use languages as a means to travel and work abroad. Analyst Marian Velsic says:

"It is important what the market for teaching foreign languages offers, whether there are enough language schools, if they are good enough, if they are reachable. Bratislava doesn't have a problem with this. But to study Italian in a smaller town, could be a problem."

The Council of Europe and the EU launched a challenge requiring that each EU citizen should master their mother tongue, plus 2 major EU languages and another third language, a lesser spread one. We'll see whether Slovaks will be able to stand up to this challenge, after May 2004.