The line graph shows the number of students studying six different languages at one university in Britain from 1990 to 2015.
Overall, there was an upward trend in the numbers of students learning Spanish, Chinese, and Polish, while there was a downward trend in those learning French, German, and Arabic. The most popular language used to be French, but Spanish gained the most popularity at the end.
Starting with the trends in 1990, the most studied language was French with about 380 students. Over the first five years, there had been a slight increase to the peak of 400 students. Over the next decade and a half, the number had decreased dramatically to 200. In the last five years, it increased slightly again to just over 200. Turning to German which followed far behind, the number of students remained constant at approximately 250 in the first decade. Between 2000 and 2005, there was a gradual rise and then a continuous fall to just under 250 at the end. Following this, Spanish was much less popular than the previous two languages with roughly 8 times fewer students than French and 5 times fewer students than German. From 1990 to 2000, there had been a fluctuation before the number skyrocketed to the high of nearly 375 in 2015. After that was Arabic, which began at a bit lower point than Spanish. The period from 1990 to 2015 had seen fluctuations in the number of students studying Spanish.
The graph provided the initial data on the number of students taking Chinese lessons in 1995, five years later than most other languages mentioned, which was the same as that of Spanish. Over the first five years, the number had grown minimally to the same number before it rose sharply to almost 225 students. Subsequently, it climbed consistently to culminate at around 260 in the final year. Finally, the number of students learning Polish started the latest in 2000 at merely 25. Then, it had gone up slowly over the following decade and it continued to rise until reaching the peak of 125 students.