Only a few million people speak Sondsteadish, and outside of people with a particular interest in the culture or who are of Sondsteadish descent foreigners don't tend to learn it, so instead we've made universal bilingualism a major goal in our educational system. Compulsory education in either English or French (lately English has been the more popular choice, but French is stronger as an international language in Maredoratica than in most parts of the world) begins when a student enters primary school at age six or seven.
As a result, a large majority of the population reports being conversational in English and upwards of one third report being conversational in French. German has dropped in popularity as a foreign language over the years but remains the third most spoken foreign language. Czech, Magyar, and Sinitalian round out the main foreign language taught in Sondstead, although all are rather less popular than English, French, and German.
In parts of the country with indigenous linguistic minorities, namely the northeastern and far northern areas where several Finnic languages are spoken, some people are trilingual or even quadrilingual; many Makeish people speak Makeish, Sondsteadish, and a foreign language and some of the Almai and Nen people of the far north have some command of their native language, Makeish, Sondsteasish, and a foreign language, although very rarely fluent in all of them. In the Sondsteadish Antilles, the majority speaks an English derived creole natively, but most can also speak Sondsteadish as it is the primary language of the school system and French is also widely studied.
