From this week's mailbag:
Thursday, September 13, 2012 6:21 PM Subject: [AATG-L] German language in Europe
Yesterday at the copying machine I ran into a colleague, a native-born Spaniard, who is on sabbatical this year but has just returned from Spain for an extended visit to campus. She asked me: "Guess
which language is booming in Europe right now?" When I had no ready answer. She smiled all over and said: "German! --Really!" She said, "Young Europeans are clamoring to learn German
because Germany is the only country with a strong economy and jobs." Then she gave the example of a German language school in Valencia [southern Spain] which she passed on course sign-up day. It had long lines winding around city blocks.
Sounds real to me. Below read about the 2,500 unfilled positions in Baden Württemberg, and what they are doing about it. (And what is hampering the tens of thousands of applicants. -- 3 guesses!)
BOSTON.CO
Crisis-hit southern Europeans rush to learn German
By Jürgen Bätz Associated Press / March 6, 2012
BERLIN—Spaniards,
Portuguese and others from countries hit hard by the debt crisis are
flocking to learn German in hopes of getting jobs in Europe's biggest
and strongest economy, according to data obtained by The Associated
Press Tuesday.
Figures
from Germany's culture and language promotion agency, the Goethe
Institute, show that people in southern Europe -- where unemployment is
high, particularly among the young -- are clamoring to learn German.
Other official data show immigration to Germany from Spain, Greece and
Portugal is up sharply.
The
number of Spaniards seeking to learn German with their local branch of
the Goethe Institute rose by a staggering 35 percent in 2011, to 9,000
from 6,500 the year before. Neighboring Portugal saw a 20 percent
increase to 2,230 students...
The rise in interest in German is significant in that it shows where jobseekers expect the best work opportunities. The
Germany economy grew a robust 3 percent last year and unemployment has
dropped to its lowest level in almost two decades. Spain, by contrast,
is sliding back into recession as unemployment hits new records above 20
percent.
"The prospects of
getting a job in those countries are miserable, with youth unemployment
of 40 to 50 percent," said Herbert Brücker, a migration expert with
Germany's Institute for Employment Research. Many firms in Germany are searching to hire skilled professionals, but a language barrier often hinders successful recruitment.
"Employers are rather demanding when it comes to requiring German language skills," Bruecker said.
Take
the example of Schwäbisch-Hall, a prosperous city of 37,000 in
Baden-Württemberg, a southwestern state that is home to industrial
giants like carmaker Daimler AG and successful small and medium-sized businesses. The
companies need skilled workers, but supply in Germany is tight. To
help, the city invited a group of journalists from Portugal, Greece,
Italy and Spain to a reporting trip this year to cover the issue. The
move resulted in more than 10,000 job applications pouring in from
Portugal alone, "and the number keeps rising," city spokesman Robert
Gruner said.
"They have sent them to every email address they could find on our website, it's incredible," he told the AP.
But
the regional job office, which currently has about 2,500 vacancies
listed, has found that most applicants share a common problem.
"Unfortunately only about five percent have knowledge of German, which
makes getting them a job here significantly more difficult," Gruner
said.
Those seeking jobs
have apparently realized this weakness as well, leading to the boom in
numbers at language schools like the Goethe Institute, named after the
writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.
In Italy, the agency's number of
students was up by 14 percent to 4,300, followed by Greece and France
with an increase of ten and eight percent respectively.
Worldwide,
the number of German language students with the Goethe Institute rose
by 7.5 percent to about 235,000, according to the figures. Some
36,000 of those came to Germany to study with the Goethe Institute
here. Of those coming from within the European Union, the number of
Spaniards was up 43 percent on the year, while Greeks saw a 22 percent
increase and Italians 17 percent.
"Most
of them are young people who are taking our classes," Goethe Institute
head Klaus-Dieter Lehmann said late Tuesday following the figure's
official release. "Not because they want to read Goethe or (Friedrich)
Schiller in their original tongue, but because they want to improve
their job chances."
....For more immigration statistics: Continued...
....For more immigration statistics: Continued...
Barry Hatton in Lisbon and Daniel Woolls in Madrid contributed reporting.
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Juergen Baetz can be reached on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/jbaetz
