Mandarin Chinese and other foreign languages, including Polish, Lithuanian and Portuguese, are to be offered as subjects of Ireland's Leaving Certificate Examinations, a cabinet minister said on Wednesday.
The Leaving Certificate Examinations, commonly referred to as the Leaving Cert, is the final examination in the Irish middle school systems.
Irish Education Minister Richard Bruton said the move will help students to prepare for the economic threat posed by Brexit and the increasing global importance of the non-Western countries.
A 10-year strategy, to be launched in the next few weeks by Bruton, will include ambitious targets to increase the number of students studying foreign languages.
Under the strategy, all junior middle school students will study a foreign language by 2021.
There is no fixed timeline for the rollout of the new Leaving Cert languages, but it could be achieved over the next five years.
