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Nearly quarter of Austrian school students speak foreign conversational language: report

Xinhua, February 22, 2017 Adjust font size:

Almost 24 percent of school students in Austria speak a language other than German as their conversational language, Austria Press Agency reported on Tuesday.

Citing figures from Statistics Austria, it said the school year 2015/2016 showed the strongest increase in the proportion of speakers of a foreign conversational language of 1.6 percent over the previous academic year, taking the total number of such students to 263,000.

Over the previous 10-year period the increase in the number was about 8 percent.

The national capital Vienna had the highest proportion of the foreign-language-speaking students, which is almost half the total.

It was further noted that the large influx of asylum seekers in recent years played a significant role in the increase, as children speaking Arabic as their conversational language seeing the highest proportion of growth, up 2,400 to 11,200. Enditem