Europeans seems to have more emphasis on being multilingual, I'm guessing it helps a bit with all the different nations and languages so close compared to the US. Are other languages as common as English seems to be?
Here's the deal. Every country in Europe has their own little language that they consider to be the ultimate language of all time.
However, almost ALL multinational companies will go "our internal business language is English, so know English, ok?" as it's simply easier than hiring a bucketload of interpreters and translators to do all the dirty work. So, naturally, English tends to end up being the primary language everybody learns.
Now, the OTHER languages you learn will depend on which country you're from. In Denmark, we would typically learn Swedish and German as they're our neighbor countries, and we'd like to be able to speak with them when they travel to our country as tourists. Speaking their language makes them happy and thus more likely to come give us more money another time.
Some Danes learn French or Spanish, but that's mostly a bit of cultural snobbery, really. We don't really use those languages, so it's used more to try something different. Generally Danes tend to be quite multilingual as we do know that nobody will ever really bother learning our tiny insignificant language unless they HAVE to. Easier for us to learn English, German or even French or Spanish. Also got friends who've learned Russian, Arabic, Japanese and Chinese btw
Anyway, in the big picture, there's three primary languages in Europe - Germanic, Italic and Slavic, and people tend to stick with their "own", so to speak.
Germanic being English, German, Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, Dutch etc
Italic being Spanish, Italian, Romanian, French, Portuguese etc
Slavic being the general Eastern Europe - Russian, Polish, Czech, Bulgarian, Bosnian, Serbian etc.
So for a Dane it's much harder to learn French than English as it's a different base language, for example. Which is also why you'll see a lot of Italians and Spanish having a hard time with English.
Sorry for the long rant, but languages interest me
