Is Italian really the Fourth Most Studied Language in the World ?

Yes, that’s what I was starting to think.

In places where a strong lingua franca is in place, many young people, who otherwise speak a different language at home, probably learn it by osmosis so to speak, by daily contact with no or little formal lessons. With this in mind, I’d be willing to bet that Swahili and Arabic, to name just two, have more second-language speakers than Italian.

However, it’s been suggested upthread that the statistic may be true if the focus is on “studied”, i.e. learnt academically, at school or University. That, I could believe.

For instance, here in Belgium, Dutch and English are the default foreign languages (for French-speaking Belgians - not Flemings, of course). For students who want to learn a third foreign language, German and Spanish come next. But in insitutions that offer a wider choice, Italian is almost always represented, along with Chinese, Arabic and/or Russian. The school I work for offers Italian as a third foreign language and, while it is dwarfed in terms of students by Spanish (+/- 200), it has about the same number of students as German (20) and significantly more than Chinese (10 perhaps).

So, from a purely academic point of view, the statistic may not be completely BS. But there’s no way that Italian is the number 4 when it comes to “second language” in general.