this post was submitted on 15 Feb 2026
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Sometimes, I think it's funny that in Anglo countries it's referred to as ESL, English as a second language.
For us (and I guess many others) it was always English as a foreign language. Could be first foreign language, second foreign language...
second language just means any languages that aren't your first language. not the second language you learn.
Every time I hear ESL I go "English Sign Language?" before remembering that's ASL.
Fun fact: American sign language differs from British sign language, as it is derived from french sign language. So a french and American signer would understand each other, while a Brit would not.
I thought it was renamed to ESOL, or English for Speakers of Other Languages, in 2000 or so. I guess that wasn't a totally universal change.
Now EAL, English as an additional language.
If you're learning in an English speaking country, they're not going to call English a foreign language.
Yeah, I think in all countries with universal Education, at highschool level and even earlier there are classes for native speaking kids covering readind and writting in and later knowledge of things like formal grammatical structure and such for the local language, so it makes sense to distinguish classes aimed at foreigners to learn the local language from the ground up from classes aimed at local kids who already know how instinctivelly how to speak it.
So " as a Second Language" is a valid name, if a bit presumptuous sounding (it makes it sound as if that's the second most important language one speaks). In other countries I've more often seen " for Non-Native Speakers" or similar, never calling it a second language.
Majority of the world speaks a single language or two at most. Shit half the people I see online can't even speak one.
It makes sense you when you look at it like that. most people in ESL programs only speak a single language, if you speak more than two you probably don't need ESL classes and can learn on your own.
Languages come in tiers. English is the global lingua franca. People use it to speak to anyone, no matter whether English native speaker or not. If someone from Norway wants to talk to someone from Japan, they'll most likely use English since both of them likely speak it.
Then there's regional lingua francas, languages like Spanish, Russian or Mandarin. These languages are popular in specific parts of the world and often used to get around there. Someone from Ukraine can speak to someone from Belarus using Russian.
Lastly, there's local languages that are spoken only in a country (or even only a part of a country). People speak them because that's what they were grown up with.
So in general, there's 4 "language slots" of languages people speak:
One language can fill multiple slots.
So for example, if you grew up in Ukraine and moved to Germany, you might speak the following languages, according to the slots above:
If you are born in Wales and never moved away, it might look like this:
If you spent your life in the US, it would be like this:
This is the reason why people living in countries with lower-tier languages frequently speak 3-4 languages, while English native speakers really struggle to even learn the basics of one additional language. Because the former group has an actual use for more than one language, while the latter one don't.
Or maybe french is the lingua franca..?
Not any more. It used to be, which is where the term comes from, but it hasn't been for a long time.
I know I just find it amusing
If you are born in Wales and never moved away, it might look like this:
Welsh is an official language of the UK and most things in Wales are in Welsh first and English second.
Away from the south and the more touristy areas, you're likely to find people speaking Welsh in everyday life (education, shopping, workplace), rather than just at home.
Oh, and Wales, England and Scotland are countries. The UK is a state made up of 3 countries and a region, whereas the USA is a country made up of 50 states and some territories and districts etc.
I lived in Wales for a year and I managed to learn some very basic Welsh myself. It's been about 15 years now, but at least back then it was mainly old and very young people who spoke Welsh. Most people aged 20-60 didn't speak Welsh at all, with the younger ones learning it at school.
But I guess with that generation being up to maybe 35 now, speaking Welsh is likely much more common than it was back then. So yeah, my chart above is likely outdated.
My central point is just that Welsh is one of the languages of Wales and so can be third on your bullet points.
I think it's at the very least rather undiplomatic to argue that it shouldn't be called a national language of Wales.
I've had people swear blind to me that they visited Wales on holiday and Welsh people are rude because they speak English in the shop until an English person turns up and then they switch to Welsh to exclude the English. I think they were mistaken that English was being spoken before they went in (how would they know?) and just assumed they were speaking English until they started paying attention, when they realised it was Welsh. I'm willing to bet £10 that any such people cannot accurately tell me the content of the English that was being spoken until they "switched to Welsh".
Culturally, ignoring Welsh or downplaying its relevance to real people's lives is similar in offence to telling British people that they don't speak American properly, that they spell words like colour incorrectly, and that they should stop putting on their absurd British accent and just speak normally.
I'm not argueing that it isn't the national language. I just said that you could grow up in Wales never learning Welsh, because English is just as much (if not more) the language used in every-day dealings.
That said, the farthest north I have been was Merthyr Tydfil.
At least in the areas I have been in and the time that I lived there, Welsh was a language you had to actively seek out and not a language that was necessary to know if you lived there.
And that's the point of the 3rd category: That's the language you need to know to get around well in that country. If you go to the doctor's, if you want to talk to your coworkers, if you want to make friends with the locals, which language do you need?
I'm from Vienna and it's a similar thing with the Viennese dialect. While there is a limited revival happening, it's mostly a cultural relic more than a necessity in every-day life. 70 years ago, if you didn't speak Viennese you'd be an outcast. Now it's rare that someone speaks it.
While I was in Wales I got myself Welsh language resources and actively sought out Welsh speakers to try to learn the language, but of all the people I met there, I only met two adults who could fluently speak Welsh. The kids learned it in school as a second language, but by and large the adults didn't speak it.
Like I said,
If the furthest north you went was Methryr Tydfil, you were never more than 15-20 miles from the M4 corridor, which is where the most strongly English speaking areas are, (apart from South Pembrokeshire and some more touristy bits).
I'm not surprised that you found mostly English speaking in the mostly English speaking parts of Wales. If you had stayed in East Anglia you might have concluded that England possessed no hills at all, but it might be worth admitting that there's more to know than that.
So,
(apart from it being compulsory in Welsh schools)
in the South and more touristy areas, whereas Welsh is the main spoken language in much of the country further North.
Which makes my assertion correct.
Can you grow up in Wales never learning Welsh? Yes.
Can you grow up in Wales never learning English?
There's more to a country than is in front of your nose, and for the third time, learning Welsh is compulsory in schools. You're acting incredibly ignorant and you sound like you're trying to be offensive deliberately.
You are acting like you deliberately want to be offended. Congratulations, you got what you came for.
Source? I think speaking one language is pretty rare. Most Europeans speak at least two, most Africans I've met speak 3, lots of Indians speak 3 as well...
sorry I was wrong, it's not a majority. It's roughly 40% of the world's population.
Fair enough.
Bit of confirmation bias in that, no?
Very possible, that's why I would love to have a source.
I think anyone in India and Africa speaks 4 languages easily.
I think many Chinese people are also bilingual (i.e. Wu+ always mandarin). They often learn another language in school (English or something geographically closer, like Korean).
Yes... some are even tri-lingual because of village dialect (eg: Taishanese) + province dialect (eg: Cantonese) + national dialect (Mandarin)
Unfortunately, the PRC government is heavily pushing Mandarin and some of the local variants (aka: "dialects") are slowly dying... some kids in Guangzhou don't even speak Cantonese anymore...
Shanghaiese is semi-dead... from what I heard
Cantonese is slowly limping its way forward only because they have Hong Kong TV, I don't think there are many TV shows in Shanghaiese.
If Hong Kong falls... Cantonese is gonna die... :(
Parents also never spoke Taishanese to me... so yea I unfortunately cannot pass on that language... no Taishanese media... hard to find motivation to learn more about it.
So I only have Cantonese and Mandarin...
I doubt my kids (if I ever have any) would be able to learn it... most 2nd generation overseas Chinese kinda just English-Only with bare minimum in ancestor's language.
Proving your own point, nice.
Well, if you add up the number of speakers of second languages according to this page, and assume anybody speaks at least one language as their first one, you'll end up with almost exactly 1.4 as the average number of languages any given human speaks.
That's the lower bound, though, as I only added up second languages where the number of speakers is at least one million, and Wikipedia doesn't list many more anyway.
Viewing it as primary/secondary makes more sense of it.
Remember switching to your secondary language is faster than stumbling over the tip of your tongue.
English as 4th (Spoken) Language Speaker here...
Before English I have:
Cantonese
Mandarin
Taishanese (well... for Taishanese, I mostly only understand but not speak because parents never spoke it to us, only when talking to the older generations and I overhear it)
Sorry for the low-key brag but since nobody here speak these languages so I just wanna mention it xD
They don't mean like a hot list for girls you like or your favorite songs, every one after native is "second"
For me English is my 3rd language.
My mother tongue is Tamil, Malay is my 2nd. I do understand a bit of Hokkien but rarely practice it.
English is my 5th language. Gaelic is my 3rd.
Its ESL in English Speaking countries, and EFL in non- English speaking countries
Because English as an Nth language doesn't quite have the same ring.
It's not a foreign language in English speaking countries...