THE POSITION OF FRENCH IN THE CZECH SCHOOL SYSTEM: CHALLENGES OF A MULTILINGUAL LANDSCAPE RESHAPED BY THE WAR IN UKRAINE

Abstract

Since 2004, foreign-language teaching in the Czech Republic has been shaped by European recommendations and programmes (Lisbon 2000, CEFR 2001, Barcelona 2002). These initiatives quickly generalised English and, in 2013, introduced a compulsory second foreign language. This long, initially gradual evolution was abruptly reshaped after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022. In just two school years Russian lost more than three percentage points in primary schools and nearly two points in upper-secondary schools. The reallocation is uneven: Spanish absorbs most of the freed enrolments (+ 0.75 pt in primary and + 1.49 pt in secondary), German gains only in primary and declines in secondary, while French attracts very few additional pupils (0.12 pt and 0.19 pt, respectively). The article shows how these transfers differ by region and level, then discusses the Czech Ministry of Education’s decisions. It concludes that a proactive French policy (retraining Russian teachers, expanding bilingual schools, and launching targeted local initiatives) could take advantage of the current favourable demographics to strengthen the presence of French before Spanish secures a dominant, hard-to-reverse position.