France likes to present itself as a champion of linguistic diversity. On paper, secondary school students can choose from a dozen or more foreign languages, plus regional tongues like Breton, Corsican, and Occitan. In practice, though, the numbers tell a much simpler story: a handful of languages dominate, and everything else is a rounding error.

Here’s what the data actually shows, based on the French Ministry of Education’s most recent figures (DEPP, school year 2024, published June 2025).

English is basically universal

Nearly every student in French secondary school (collège) studies English — 99.6% of them, to be precise. It’s almost always chosen as the first foreign language (LV1), typically starting in 6ème, the first year of collège (and often even earlier, in elementary school).

By the time students reach the general and technological lycée track, the picture is just as lopsided: 100% study a first foreign language, and English remains the overwhelming default.

Spanish is the clear number two

Once English is out of the way, Spanish takes over as the second language (LV2), usually introduced in 5ème. It’s studied by 57.5% of collège students — not close to English, but far ahead of everything else on the list.

German holds a distant third place

German comes in at 12.5%, making it the third most common choice. It’s been losing ground for years, a trend the teachers’ union SNES-FSU has flagged as a concern, since it further narrows the diversity of languages actually taught in classrooms.

Everyone else fights over the scraps

After the top three, the numbers drop off sharply:

• Italian — 5.0%
• Other national languages (Arabic, Chinese, Russian, Portuguese, and others) — 1.5% combined
• Regional languages (Breton, Occitan, Corsican, Basque, and others) — 0.5% combined

A third language, or LV3, exists too, but it’s optional and mostly confined to lycée. Even there, uptake is small: only 3.3% of general and technological lycée students take a third language, and that number has been falling since the baccalauréat reform.

A wide menu, rarely used

What makes this lopsidedness notable is how generous the official language offering actually is. Students can, in theory, choose from 12 foreign languages for their first language — German, English, Arabic, Chinese, Spanish, Modern Hebrew, Italian, Japanese, Dutch, Polish, Portuguese, and Russian. For a second language, the list grows further to include Turkish and around ten regional languages. All told, 44 languages can be taken at the baccalauréat exam.

That range is genuinely unusual in Europe. But offering a language and having students actually study it are two different things. In reality, budget constraints, teacher availability, and student choice consistently funnel the vast majority of pupils toward the same three languages.

Who studies more languages?

The data also points to a social pattern: girls and students from more advantaged socioeconomic backgrounds tend to study more languages overall, even when comparing students at the same education level. This gap has prompted calls — including from teachers’ unions — for more investment in less commonly taught languages, both to preserve linguistic diversity and to address unequal access.

The bottom line

If you’re picturing French classrooms as a hub of linguistic variety, the reality is more concentrated: English is essentially mandatory, Spanish is the default second choice, German is a shrinking third option, and everything else — from Italian to Arabic to Breton — is chosen by a small minority of students.