How to List Your Spoken Languages on a Resume: Examples

Are you bilingual or multilingual and wondering how to sell your foreign languages on a resume? Congratulazioni! Whether you were lucky enough to grow up in a bilingual family, have traveled abroad or studied at school, learning a foreign language is no piece of cake. It requires plenty of time, commitment, and patience. But the hard work pays off.

Speaking foreign languages can help you advance in your career and earn 5% - 20% more per hour on average than those who only master one. In this article we show you how to add foreign languages to your resume like a pro and share examples.

What Are Language Skills at Work?

When we talk about language skills in the context of your career, we refer to your capability to speak one or more foreign languages to a level that allows you to use them comfortably in the workplace. If this is the case for you, then you can – and should – put your languages on your resume to boost your employability.

To communicate with people, express coherent thoughts, and understand others, every language speaker relies on four essential abilities, that usually work in pairs. For example, listening and speaking go hand in hand, while reading and writing are paired.

1. Listening

Listening implies hearing, understanding and correctly deciphering the someone is saying to us. Communication without listening is impossible, as it is crucial to formulating relevant responses and keeping conversations flowing. In the workplace, we count on listening during job interviews, meetings, and in each and every other verbal conversation.

2. Speaking

Speaking competence is the essential companion to listening. Speaking involves being able to express yourself with clarity and coherence, and to do so you’ll need a certain amount of vocabulary under your belt. Native speakers typically know 15,000 to 20,000 word families, meaning root words and all their variations.

However, scientists estimate that to speak and understand a language in day-to-day settings, like speaking with family members, you only need between 800 and 3,000 of those word families. Having a vocabulary foundation in a foreign language anywhere between basic and native speaker level is a tremendous asset for improving your work relationships and securing more prestigious roles in your career.

3. Reading

Reading is the ability to grasp and deduct meaning and context from written texts. By exercising your reading skills in any language, you learn more vocabulary and further progress in your learning journey. On top of that, you also advance your analysis abilities and understand better how people in that culture perceive the world and their relationships. At work, you’ll practice this skill by dealing with emails, chat messages, reports, memos, and more.

4. Writing

Writing goes hand in hand with reading and is based on the ability to put down one’s thoughts with the right words, format, and tone. At work, you’ll write emails, reports and presentations. It’s often the most difficult among the basic competencies to master in a foreign language, especially if you don’t or haven’t lived in a country where that language is native. However, even if you’re still working on your writing skills, adding languages on your resume is a great idea, as depending on the role, your other three language skills may be more important anyway.

Is Being Bilingual a Skill?

Bien sûr! There’s no consensus on whether foreign languages are soft or hard skills, but that’s precisely because they hold characteristics of both. They could be considered hard skills because you can acquire them through training, plus their level can be measured with tests or certifications. However, they can also be seen as soft skills since, for instance, in a bilingual resume, the languages a person speaks become part of their natural traits and to many extents the languages they speak shape their character.

Why Are Language Skills on a Resume Attractive to Employers?

Based on research from the New American Economy (NAE) the demand for people who speak multiple languages has more than doubled in the last five years. ¿Por qué? You ask? Mainly for two reasons:

1. An increasing number of companies have gone global. As a result, to thrive in new markets, they need people with foreign languages on their resume.
2. The number of people in the U.S. who speak a language other than English at home has been growing, reaching around 68 million. To embrace this change and attract these customers, businesses and public services need employees who speak their language. For instance, speaking Chinese languages or Spanish at work, can widen your pool of businesses in which you secure a role.

In Which Industries Do Resume Language Skills Go Further?

Languages on a resume are increasingly more attractive to employers across the board. There are, however, sectors in which multilingual speakers are in higher demand. As a bi- or multi-lingual person, you could even climb the corporate ladder faster in these disciplines:

• healthcare
• education
• law
• finance and banking
• retail
• marketing

Most of these are primary services industries. Think about, for instance, how besides medical interpreters, every patient-facing medical professional, such as doctors and nurses, can benefit from being proficient in more than one language to do their job. After all, there are patients who do not speak English at all, and others that would feel more comfortable discussing medical matters in their native tongue.

Similarly, to deal with the law or financial subjects, imagine the relief of finding a lawyer or a bank customer representative speaking your language. Parents and kids that speak foreign languages at home also acclimatize faster if personnel in the education system offer bilingual support. Finally, having languages on your resume comes in handy too for jobs at companies launching new services and products targeted to these demographics.

How to Determine and Define Your Language Proficiency Levels for Your Resume?

Maybe you’re bilingual and have been speaking Spanish at home all your life, maybe you learned Italian during your year abroad or picked up French at school. So, you speak the language, por supuesto, but how do you determine the level of your languages on a resume?

While using terms like basic, intermediate, or proficient is one option, the most reliable method is to self-assess online. You can find various online websites to test your language level for free.

These websites base results on language proficiency frameworks, from which you can also earn an official language certification to express your languages on a resume. The most important common scales are:

• Interagency Language Roundtable (ILR). Use this scale in your federal resume if you wish to apply for any role requiring foreign languages in the U.S. government. It evaluates language ability in levels from 0 (no proficiency) to 5 (native).
• American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL). Created by an American organization of language educators and researchers, it rates language proficiency in eight levels from Novice Low to Distinguished.
• Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR). This is an international scale, primarily used in Europe. Make sure to use it if you apply to European jobs or for positions in European companies in the U.S. It features six level from A1 - basic user to C2 - native proficient user.

Whenever possible, match the scale used in your resume to the one used in the job posting. If no language framework is clearly cited, make sure to add next to your chosen scale level a clarification like “intermediate”, “proficient” or such, in case recruiters aren’t familiar with such scales.

Language Skills Examples for Your Resume

Want to know what these scales look like when really used on a resume? Check out these examples of expressing language skills:

Example 1

Language Skills

• American English — Native / Distinguished (ACTFL)
• Canadian French — Fluent / Superior (ACTFL)
• Spanish — Conversational / Intermediate High (ACTFL)

Example 2

Language Skills

• American English — Level 5 (ILR)
• Spanish — Level 5 (ILR)
• Italian — Level 3 (ILR)

Example 3

Language Skills

• English — C2 Native Speaker (CEFR)
• German — C1 Proficient User (CEFR) certified in 20XX
• Polish — B2 Independent User (CEFR), acquired in during year abroad experience in University

Example 4

Skills

• Hindi Language, Bilingual Level 5 (ILR)
• Java, SQL, Phyton
• SAP
• Adobe Creative Suite
• Microsoft Excel

Where to Put “Bilingual” on Your Resume?

To decide where and how to list your languages on a resume, the first question you have to ask yourself is, how many languages do you speak? If the answer is more than two, you should dedicate a full section in your resume to your languages to really make them stand out.

This is especially true if you’re applying to a role that specifically requires them. As far as the positioning of such a section in your resume, place it after your regular skills section, whether you use a reverse-chronological resume or a functional one.

How To List Bilingual Skills on Your Resume

If you speak just two languages fluently, a full language section is not necessary. Place your additional language and level at the top of your regular skills section to grab attention straight away. Then also include “bilingual” as part of your professional summary, as well as in your cover letters. For example, introduce yourself as a “bilingual CRM manager” or “bilingual export sales manager”.

Put your bilingual skills to work in a fulfilling job with help from Monster.

Create a free candidate account and discover bi- and multi-lingual opportunities. Add your languages on a resume, upload, and voilà you’re good to go. Activate our customized job alerts so you only receive postings matching your preferences. We’ll also promote your bilingual resume to our partner recruiters and companies.