Babel on the Danube

As a follow-up to Tuesday’s post about the majority-minority public schools in Oslo, the following brief account reports the latest statistics on the cultural enrichment of schools in Austria. Vienna is the most fully enriched location, and seems to be in roughly the same situation as Oslo.

Many thanks to Hermes for the translation from Unzensuriert.at:

Austria — The number of German-speaking primary school students has declined dramatically

The number of pupils with a first language other than German has doubled from 1995 to 2011. This is what the recently-issued “National Report on Education” shows. During this time, the percentage of “monolingual German” children at primary schools dropped from 88% to 76%.

The doubling in the number of multilingual students is evident in virtually all provinces in Austria. In Carinthia, Lower Austria, Salzburg, Tyrol and Vorarlberg, the rise is a little lower, in Upper Austria is a bit higher, and in Burgenland it remained on average. The Styrian province is the only outlier, where the number of children with a different native language has tripled from about 5,000 to 16,000.

Barely any students with German as mother tongue in Vienna

The nationwide statistics conceals the dramatic developments in Vienna, because German is hardly spoken in the primary schools of the federal capital. The district in Vienna where this is most blatantly visible is Margareten, where the proportion of immigrant children has risen to 89 % — that is, 924 out of 1038 children have as their mother tongue something other than German. The districts Rudolf Fünfhaus and Ottakring have a proportion of 80%, Brigittenau 79% and Meidling at least 70%.

For a complete listing of previous enrichment news, see The Cultural Enrichment Archives.