Why LinkedIn's Language Proficiency Classification Is Wrong (And How To Fix It)
Moving Beyond 'Native or Bilingual'
Nine out of ten US employers report relying on employees with language skills other than English. 56% say this demand will increase in the future, and 25% report losing business due to a lack of foreign language skills. It's not surprising that LinkedIn dedicates a profile section to reporting languages spoken and proficiency levels. However, as a linguist specializing in second language acquisition, I find their classification system deeply problematic.
The Problem with "Native or Bilingual"
Asturian is one of my mother tongues, alongside Spanish. You probably haven't heard of this language, and for good reason. Asturian is a Romance language—just like Spanish, Italian, or Romanian—spoken in Asturias, a region in Northwestern Spain. Unlike Catalan or Galician, it isn't recognized as an official language. This means that even though my mother spoke both Asturian and Spanish to me, I never studied it in school and never learned to write it properly.
What option should I select on LinkedIn? It's technically one of my native languages, but I wouldn't be able to work using it. I'm writing this blog post in English, a language I mastered as an adult, and I couldn't produce equivalent content in Asturian. This same dilemma faces millions of Spanish speakers in the US. They've never received formal education in Spanish and struggle to use the language in professional settings—not from a lack of capacity, but from a lack of training and practice.
A Better Approach: Functional Proficiency
A more useful approach would be to classify languages by functional proficiency—describing what you can actually do in a language. Various frameworks have been created for this purpose. Perhaps you've heard people mention having a "B1 level in French." That's the CEFR (Common European Framework of Reference for Languages), created by the European Union to standardize language proficiency descriptions.
The most common framework in the US is the ACTFL (American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages) Proficiency Guidelines. I recently became certified as an official Oral Proficiency Interview rater for Spanish using this framework. I prefer it because it's more intuitive and describes what you can do with a language, rather than when you learned it.
The guidelines are visualized as an inverted pyramid (showing that at the base you can do very little, while at the top you can do much more). Broadly speaking:
Beginner learners can only name a few things and repeat memorized expressions
Intermediate learners can describe basic aspects of their daily lives and complete routine transactions like ordering food
Advanced learners can discuss societal issues and narrate in past, present, and future tenses
Superior learners can hypothesize, support opinions with arguments, and discuss highly abstract topics
With this system, if you're hiring someone with an Advanced score from ACTFL, you know exactly what they're qualified to do. Need someone to explain complex ideas? Look for Superior level. Need someone to greet clients? Intermediate level would suffice.
When "Native" Doesn't Tell the Whole Story
I learned English as an adult and Asturian as a child, yet I can do many more things in English. If you were hearing me instead of reading this, you'd notice my accent—but so what? I can write a dissertation about morphophonological prediction in English, something I couldn't do in Asturian. The accent merely reveals when I learned the language, not what I can actually do with it.
How LinkedIn Could Improve
LinkedIn's current system prioritizes when you learned a language over your functional ability to use it professionally—a distinction that matters tremendously in today's global workplace. By adopting a functional proficiency framework like ACTFL, LinkedIn could offer employers meaningful insights into candidates' actual language capabilities.
Imagine a LinkedIn profile that shows not just that someone speaks Spanish, but specifies they can "conduct business negotiations" or "create technical documentation" in that language. This would give both employers and professionals a clearer picture of language skills that matter in specific contexts. It would also validate the skills of heritage speakers who may not identify as "native" but have developed professional-level abilities in certain domains.
In an increasingly global economy where language skills translate directly to business opportunities, we need classification systems that reflect what professionals can actually do with language—not just when or how they learned it.