Spanish most popular third language for Icelandic students

Photo: Iceland Monitor/Styrmir Kári

Spanish retains its position as most popular third foreign language among Icelandic secondary-school students, new figures for the 2014-15 academic year suggest.

Following the two languages which are mandatory for most secondary-school students in Iceland – English and Danish – Spanish overtook German as the most popular third language back in 2012-13 and remains in that position. 4,231 Icelandic secondary-school students studied Spanish over the 2014-15 academic year.

After Spanish come German and French. There were even 77 secondary-school students in 2014-15 doing Japanese, while seven were learning Chinese.

Figures from Statistics Iceland show that the proportion of students learning at least one foreign language in Iceland has remained stable at around 70-75%.

However, there is a tendency to learning fewer foreign languages. From a high point of 1.47 foreign languages per student in 2004-05, the number had fallen to 1.34 in 2014-15.

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