Nearly all secondary school pupils in Cyprus learn a foreign language with the island ranking second in the EU according to figures released by Eurostat.

A total of 99.9%, of secondary pupils on the island learn a foreign language – with the only countries to hit the 100% mark being Denmark, Sweden, Luxembourg and Slovenia.

The 2014 figures show that 88.9% of secondary school pupils in Cyprus learn two foreign languages, with only 11% restricting their learning to just one language. English is learnt by 99.9% students while French stands at 88.1%.

Learning a foreign language at school is very common in the EU with around 18 million lower secondary school pupils (or 98.6% of all pupils at this level) studying at least one foreign language in 2014. Among them, nearly 11 million (59.9%) were studying two foreign languages or more.

English was by far the most popular language at lower secondary level, studied by more than 17 million pupils (97.3%). French (5 million or 33.7%) came second, followed by German (3 million or 23.1%) and Spanish (2 million or 13.1%).

At present, there are 24 official languages recognised within the EU.

In addition, there are regional languages, minority languages, and languages spoken by migrant populations. It should also be noted that several EU member states have more than one official language.