According to the Federal State Educational Standard (FSES) for the 5^th – 9^th school-grades, which was introduced at the beginning of this academic year, the study of two foreign languages is compulsory for all children in Russia. Bilingual child development requires a lot of consideration since it touches upon languages acquisition issues proper as well as geolinguistic and geopolitical aspects.

Exploring the process of two foreign languages acquisition should start with the combination of languages when choosing the first and the second: here the policy makers should consider the preferences of the state and the preferences of the learners themselves. It is no longer disputable which language has become international as an international business and commercial language, a scientific language, a language of cyberspace. The choice of English as a second foreign language is more or less grounded. But what language should be given preference to when choosing a third foreign language?

In an effort to evaluate the current and future prospects for a multilingual Russian, this paper addresses the issues from the local context through analyzing the foreign languages studied in Transbaikal region, Far Eastern Siberia of Russia. The authors analyze linguistic status of a few foreign languages taught at schools and higher educational institutions, the objective situation with ‘dying’ foreign languages in the region and the results of governmental decisions for the future of certain foreign linguistic communities.  Learning the language of the transborder neighbour, China, has become a trend in our region. A lot of children cannot acquire the Chinese language to develop bilingual proficiency and suffer their school years struggling between studying English and Chinese. The authors analyze the difficulties and give recommendations to eliminate them.

The methods of study include observation and comparative analysis, statistics, linguistic experiment.