Una lengua extranjera es una lengua diferente de la lengua materna de una persona. La persona solamente adquiere esa lengua extranjera si la aprende de manera consciente, ya sea en una escuela, con cursos de idiomas o de manera autodidacta, o bien, en el caso de los niños, cuando el aprendizaje ocurre jugando en un ámbito de lengua extranjera. Muchos estudios han resaltado el valor de la exposición natural mediante estudios en el extranjero u otras experiencias extra-curriculares (Rehner and Mougeon 2003; Schmidt 2009), sin embargo especialistas están reconociendo que la información transmitida en el salón de clase puede facilitar la adquisición de características muy particulares de la variación sociolingüística (Gutierrez and Fairclough 2006; Howard 2012). El dominio de al menos una lengua extranjera es una ventaja en varios ámbitos laborales, por ejemplo: hotelería, comercio internacional, investigación, etc.

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A foreign language is a language indigenous to another country. It is also a language not spoken in the native country of the person referred to, i.e., an English speaker living in Guam can say that Chamorro is a foreign language to him or her. These two characterisations do not exhaust the possible definitions, however, and the label is occasionally applied in ways that are variously misleading or factually inaccurate. Some children learn more than one language from birth or from a very young age: they are bilingual or multilingual. These children can be said to have two, three or more mother tongues: neither language is foreign to that child, even if one language is a foreign language for the vast majority of people in the child's birth country. For example, a child learning English from his English father and Irish at school in Ireland can speak both English and Irish, but neither is a foreign language to him. This is common in countries such as India, South Africa, or Canada due to these countries having multiple official languages. In general, it is believed that children have advantage to learning a foreign language over adults. However, there are studies which have shown adult students are better at foreign language learning than child students. It is because adults have pre-existing knowledge of how grammar works, and a superior ability of memorizing vocabulary.

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