Findings. Languages spoken:Of the 43 out of 47 participants who returned questionnaires, 34 were Non-Native English Speakers (NNES) and 9 were Native English Speakers

Languages spoken: Of the 43 out of 47 participants who returned questionnaires, 34 were Non-Native English Speakers (NNES) and 9 were Native English Speakers (NES). The NESs came from different parts of the UK, including England, Scotland, the Channel Islands, and from Ireland, while the NNESs represented a range of 20 different nationalities. The largest contingent of NNESs was Spanish (5 participants), followed by German (3 participants) and Dutch (3 participants) and then several pairs or single participants from the remaining countries.

This widely multinational group included speakers of 17 different first languages, with the biggest group being the British and Irish (9 participants whose first language is English), followed by the Dutch (5), Spanish (4, plus 2 whose first language is Catalan), German (4), Italian (3), Czech (2), French (2), Greek (2), Portuguese (2), Swedish (2), Danish (1), Finnish (1) Hungarian (1), Lithuanian (1), Norwegian (1) and Urdu (1).

All participants shared a common working language of English and the vast majority had some (and varying degrees of) competence in at least one other foreign language. The most commonly spoken foreign language was French (23 participants), followed by German (15), Spanish (7), Russian (4), Italian (2), Catalan (1), Icelandic (1), Portuguese (1) and Swedish (1). The prevalence of French and German as commonly used foreign languages reflects the findings of other surveys of language use in Europe, although typically German is ranked in second position, after English, and French in third (Graddol, 2000; Labrie and Quell, 1994).