Social media blamed for language loss in Albania, other European countries

Albanian language skills are falling amongst youth, according to the results of the annual state matura exam, but this phenomenon, blamed by some on social media, is also occurring throughout Europe.

Official data published by local education institutions found that young people are speaking foreign languages better than the native and official language of Albanian. Experts have also said students struggle to write essays or academic reports due to limited knowledge of the Albanian language.

“This should serve as an alarm bell to encourage children to speak, articulate, write, and read. For me, it is not worrying that we don’t have many 10s, but the fact that young people forget to speak the Albanian language correctly”, Irida Sina, an education expert, told Euronews.

She and other experts believe that the decline is down to increased time on social media, where English and, to a lesser extent, other languages are more widely used.

“The fact that they spend a long time on social networks and spend a short time communicating with each other has a very big impact. Spending so much time on social networks and what they see in English causes the Albanian language to fade, and the vocabulary will always have fewer words. We see it in first graders who have difficulty forming compound sentences,” Sina said.

Furthermore, the number of youths wanting to leave the country (60-90%, depending on the survey) also presses them to focus on speaking and learning other languages.

But this is not just an issue in Albania. In Croatia, students have been getting lower scores in Croatian compared to English for some time now. While this does not mean they are using Croatian less, it could be related to English being widely spoken by the younger generation.

According to anecdotal evidence, younger people mix English and Croatian every day, speaking much more than previous generations to the point that when teenagers talk to each other, it sounds like a pidgin language.

In Malta, where the official language is both Maltese, an Arabic-based language written in Latin letters, and English, the former is considered among the highest at risk of dying out in Europe.

Speaking in English carries a certain ‘prestige’ in Malta and was previously associated with the higher classes and the intellectual class. But now, thanks to social media, a decreasing presence of Maltese in the online sphere and an increasing number of foreign residents (between a fifth and a quarter of the total population), those who speak the language regularly and correctly are becoming a minority.

In Finland, there is a big ongoing debate over the use of English taking over from Finnish in the service sector and universities. Even the use of English in rap songs has infiltrated public discourse on using the Finnish language.

The previous government had taken steps to strengthen and retain the language for institutional and public use, but it is unclear if the new government will take a stance. The mayor of Helsinki even recently suggested that English should be Finland’s third official language next to Finnish and Swedish.

As for Slovenia, the level of English is improving amongst 6th and 9th graders, according to data from the authorities.

However, the difference in Slovenia is that the level of Slovenian fluency is also increasing, although scores are lower than that of English.

For example, between 2018 and 2023, the average grade for 6th and 9th graders was between 46.2% and 51%, increasing to between 50.5% and 59.9% in 2023. But for English, the scores are generally better, from between 51.5% and 55.7% in 2019 and 64% and 68.7% in 2023.

According to teachers, the current school vernacular is a mix of Slovene and English, with the share of English proliferating as children spend more time on social media. Overall, they believe students are progressing in English while remaining the same in Slovene.

In the Netherlands, this is also a problem. In May of this year, reports found that 20% of students aspiring to attend university who pass their final exam at the end of secondary school fail their final Dutch exam. It was also revealed that 30% of aspiring elementary school teachers did not pass the Dutch language exam on the first attempt.

Overall, the situation has been deteriorating, but it is not linked to the growing use of English. While Dutch is one of the 40 most spoken languages in the world with 24 million speakers, it is considered endangered as it is losing ground, according to a study by the University of Leiden.

In Czechia, the situation is complicated by a lack of concrete data, but according to the results of this year’s matura exams, Czech students improved in both Czech and English according to 2022’s exams.

Other languages at risk of dying out in Europe include a number of minority languages such as Manx (2,000 speakers), Cornish (8,000-13,000 speakers), Irish (77,185 speakers), Welsh (750,000 speakers) and Scots.

(Alice Taylor | Exit.al)