Band 8+: The table shows a breakdown of the most popular languages taken by native English speakers studying at the UK Centre for Foreign Language Learning in 2020.The table highlights information about the percentage of English native speaking men and women who chose to study one of nine foreign languages at a foreign language school in the UK in the year 2020.

The table compares nine different languages regarding the percentages of male and female English – speaking natives enrolled in each at the UK Centre for Foreign Language Learning in 2020.

Overall, what is most striking is that women showed a strong preference for Mandarin, while Arabic attracted the highest proportion of male students. However, Spanish was equally popular among both genders.

Regarding female learners, Mandarin with 27% was nearly double the proportion of men with 14%. A similar pattern could be seen in Polish, which attracted 11% of women compared to only 3% of men. French also followed this trend, with the percentage of females being exactly twice as much as that of males.

As for male students, Arabic at 22% and German at 14% was more than twice the proportion of females. Smaller but still evident differences were found in Welsh, Japanese and Italian, with only about no more than 4% higher than women. Spanish stood out as the only language with an identical proportion of male of female learners with 19% each.