Who are the best English speakers in Europe? (article)

By the way: "European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker joked that while everyone understood English, no one understood England." (October 2019).

I have found that the Dutch speak English incredibly well, sometimes with barely an accent closely followed by the Nordic countries, so yes, the table tallies with my experience.

But surely the Welsh, Scottish and Irish should be in the table as all have their own dialect in addition to English. Oh, and I know the Cornish can be a bit rebellious but they're still English.

Does "Cornish" mean Cornwall?

England, indeed the UK, is part of Europe.
The citizens of England are the best speakers of English.

By definition, the English. English is the language spoken by the population of England, so it is a circular question.

Old joke: how can you tell the difference between a Dutch person speaking English, and an English person?
Answer: The Dutch person makes fewer grammatical mistakes.

Also, the Scandinavians generally speak great English.

Don't underestimate the younger generation in Poland. Their pronunciation is excellent.
Don't underestimate almost everybody in Slovenia, even the old men at the railway station in Nova Gorica.

well it's not the English.

Does "Cornish" mean Cornwall?

Yes. They have their own language called Kernowek, an old Celtic dialect. Some even make mutterings about independence but I'm not sure they've truly thought it through.

Not surprised Spain/Italy are at the bottom...

"It is impossible for an Englishman to open his mouth without making some other Englishman hate or despise him," George Bernard Shaw.

Interesting report, but no one should underestimate the prominent self-selection bias in the study in terms of age, education level, internet access, and motivation to study English in the first place. See Page 44 of report. It's not surprising that, if you want to find someone in any European country to help translate, it's most likely to be a young (educated) person who is also motivated to practice his/her English skills.

Excerpts:
"The test-taking population represented in this Index is self-selected and not guaranteed to be representative. Only those who want to learn English or are curious about their English skills will participate in one of these tests. This could skew scores lower or higher than those of the general population....The EF SET is free and online, so anyone with an Internet connection can participate. Almost all of our test takers are working adults or young adults finishing their studies. People without Internet access would be automatically excluded."

"For the first time, we find that adults aged 26-30 have the strongest English skills. This finding reflects the growing prominence of English instruction in university education around the world."

Of the non-English speaking people in Europe, the Dutch are hands-down the best language people. It may be because of their long history as traders? Most people on the street in the Netherlands seem to be able to converse comfortably in any of a handful of languages. I've always been impressed.

In southern Germany, most younger people do well in English. Many older people and many in northern Germany aren't as practiced.

Chris F, love that joke! Very funny!

One explanation I've heard for the good and somewhat American-accented English of the Dutch is that the government there requires that foreign language television be subtitled rather than dubbed. So at this point, you have a couple generations of people who spend a good amount of leisure time growing up watching and listening to undubbed Friends, Lan & Order and Beverly Hills 90210 reruns. (Beverly Hills 90210 gets a mention due to the surprising popularity of Dylan as a name for millennial Benelux and French boys and my suspicion of where that came from)

Emma, that’s hysterical! Reminds me of a conversation my mom and I just had with a friend from Columbia. Trying to explain how she had been up against some difficult challenges lately, she told us “she had been through the washing machine.” We figured out later that she meant to use the phrase “she had been through the wringer”! 🤣 One of the reasons I teach English as a second language is because I love the nuances of language so much! 😀

I don't know about all the countries in this survey, but in my travels I've found that the Dutch are absolutely the most proficient in English. I had an interesting conversation with a Dutch family who were travelling in Italy, and I asked them about their language skills. I can't remember all the details of the conversation but I vaguely recall that students in high school are required to learn English and one other language by the time they graduate. There's an interesting Wikipedia page on the subject - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_in_the_Netherlands .

I'm surprised that Italy is at the bottom of the list as I've had few problems communicating with people there, at least those in the tourist industry.

So with their Dutch/British history, perhaps South Africans could get the award? In Zermatt, Switzerland one night, and encountered a couple, who spoke English. He mentioned, “we’re South African, of course.” From their accent, word choice, or any other factor, I had no idea. I don’t suspect they were Afrikaners, and they didn’t seem to be from the southern USA, but I wouldn’t have known how to pick them as South African.

So who speaks the best Icelandic? And best Tuareg?

I understand that China has required all students to study English for several years. Also, English is one of the official languages in the Philippines and students are taught English starting in elementary school. Also, we visited India and were told that about 1/6 of the population has English as their first language.

People who speak English fluently as a second language can fall down
when it comes to the more "creative" aspects of the language.

It can be exactly the same for native speakers when they go to another English speaking country. Americans in particular have great difficulty following relative time which Irish people use as a matter of course. When did you start that task? "Friday fortnight" and when will you be finished "Thursday two weeks".... and so on.

The Dutch for sure, but any individual I've encountered from a Scandinavian country not only speak grammatically beautiful English, but their accents are so subtle. Germans are also impressive with their grasp of the English language.

OK, Jim, I’ll bite . . . Is ”Friday fortnight” 2 weeks prior to last Friday? And is “Thursday two weeks” a fortnight from the nearest Thursday? Or maybe Thursday of next week? Since a fortnight is two weeks’ time, it would almost seem as if Friday fortnight would mean two weeks from Friday, and Thursday two weeks would be 2 weeks from Thursday, and so in your example, the job would’ve been finished the day before it was started!

I’ve no Irish or Nederlanders nearby to ask, but I’ll ask someone English in the morning to get their take. And wouldn’t it just be clearer to say, “I started the job 9 days ago, and will be finished in 3 days from now?”

UK has too many dialects, rendering many incomprehensible to Americans.

The Latin languages try, but they are cursed with accent problems inherent in Romance languages. On the other hand, the

Indo-?? family-- German, English, central EU & some Scandinavian pre-wire an ability to learn English with only a slight, easily understood accent.

WWII taught the Dutch to hate Germans and love Americans. Ergo, really good English which they are delighted to use with Americans.

WWII taught the Austrians to hate Russians, and the cold war made Americans an attractive alternative so, as soon as Soviet occupied Austria got some local control, one of the first things they did was to make English a required course in school. For decades, Radio Blue Danube was state run all English language radio station covering the whole country and much of S Germany. Today, the large immigrant population isn't to conversant in English, but the natives are really good at it.

More Russians speak English than they let on. Many years a go

WWII taught the Dutch to hate Germans and love Americans. Ergo, really good English which they are delighted to use with Americans.

I really don't think WWII has anything to do with the Dutch command of the English language!

The Dutch have been an exploring and trading nation for centuries, much of trading meant speaking English.

There's also the fact, as mentioned, that English speaking TV programmes and films are subtitled rather than dubbed therefore exposing children to English from an early age.

Finally, there's the similarity in the roots of both languages which makes it easier to learn. It's fairly easy to understand what "Dat is goed nieuws" translates to.

I was presenting to an international audience and described a point as
"wishy washy".

I work for a US company and have worked on projects in UK (London and Leicester) plus attended a lot of internal education and taught a few courses myself.

One of my experiences is that some US and some UK people seem to think that since their first language is English they don't have to think about what they say, so they include slang and local idioms which are not widely known internationally. I think a presenter to an international audience has an obligation to speak in a "standard" English and refrain from using local idioms.

I understand "wishy washy", but "Friday fortnight" left me baffled. Is it

• 2 weeks before last Friday?
• 2 weeks before next Friday?
• 2 weeks after next Friday?

First trip to England, back in the ‘70’s, I had the telly - T.V., television, or boob tube, depending on whose slang or standardization you’re using - and there was a talk or variety show which featured a man who could duplicate all the regional accents or dialects from around the country. The show indicated there were 27 or 46 or some number of apparently officially recognized varieties. He gave 4 or 5 or 6 examples, to rave applause from the studio audience. Silly me, but I think that with each variety, I recall just thinking, gee, he just sounds English. I realize now there are still some regional varieties, some subtle, but today I really can’t tell whether someone’s from a specific part of England.

I’m in soggy Cheltenham today, and will venture out and ask one or more people about the fortnight and 2 week day references. Maybe that’s an Irish thing, and Jim’s relocated from there to Switzerland. Speaking of the Swiss, and I was in Zurich and Geneva last month, not everybody there seems to be fluent in English. A place as affluent as Zurich doesn’t need to speak English - lol.

Sometimes the differences in regional accents are subtle enough it takes hearing a lot of them in everyday use to pick up on them. I grew up in Michigan and the tv show 'Due South' drove me nuts because the show always kept trying to pass off an Ontario accent (the show was filmed in Toronto) for a Chicago accent.

The Swedes are close...but the Dutch are the hands down winner in the EU. Their English is so good that moving there as an English only speaker would be really easy.

I would also like to see the same poll taking out people 30 years old and younger. I think growing up in the Internet age gives them a huge advantage.

Note to JC of Portsmouth:

Late 20th C globalism is a radical change in international trade. The Dutch and English now trade, but not so much fo0 a millennium before. For most of trading history, UK and Holland were hostile competitors for control of trade with other nations. Historically. there were strong tariffs on Dutch-UK trade (see mercantilism). Smuggling tea was the primary Dutch to UK trade route. The two nations fought wars over trade. They hated each other. In 1774, the Brits blockaded a Dutch port because the Brits thought there was ship there loaded with guns for America. For centuries, it was a cold day in hell before the Dutch would stoop to learning English. French was the international language, not English. 3 historic events made English the lingua franca (Latin for 'French'; lit., 'language of the Franks' ) of the world. 1] the emergence of USA as the world's dominate economy in the 19th C, 2] WWII, & 3] the decision of international air travel to make English the language used by controllers to communicate with pilots. And why was that? Because USA dominated international air travel after UK's BA Comets started exploding.

As for the existence of some common phrases in Dutch & English, so what? That is the case for almost all European languages. I can't remember why I did this, but I once asked a colleague proficient in Italian to write a paragraph in Italian that would be perfectly understandable to an English speaker. He had no trouble doing it, and not just a sentence, a whole paragraph. A paragraph on the role of written constitutions in government.

After the Normandy invasion, the Supreme Allied Commander, Europe, assigned the ever incompetent British Field Marshall Montgomery the task of liberating Belgium & Holland. After months of failure by the UK Army, the Supreme Allied Commander, Europe, reinforced the incompetent British Army with Canadian and Polish Armies and some Americans. The Canadians led the liberation of Holland. Regardless of exactly who did what,. everybody in the world know that the Red Army and the US Army defeated Hitler. The Dutch knew that too. That's one reason why post WWII Dutch loved Americans and their language. Also, among the Nazi occupied nations, Holland suffered the worst under Hitler, and after the war, it was American aid-- food, food, & food, etc that was critical in saving the Dutch.

No doubt recent Dutch generations do not share the same love of Americans of the survivors of WWII and their kids, but when we first traveled in Holland (about 1974), the love of the Dutch for Americans was embarrassing. Once the natives knew we were American, they went out of their way to befriend us. Did we want wooden shoes (no)? The souvenir seller offered to give us a token pair (still no).

It is also inconsistent that JC has no objection to my pointing out that Austria adopted English because of WW II but Portsmouth objects to the same for Holland. And since JC thinks that a few comprehensible words in another language (Dutch) proves a point, here is some German: bier, auto, bank, wein, bratwurst, butter, tee, steak, gulasch, fondue, sauerkraut.

My experience has been the same as that stated in the article/survey linked in the OP's post, that it's "Dutch" speakers. One reason may be that persons born in The Netherlands (and Belgium) often hear American English spoken at a surprisingly early age. BTW, by Dutch, I mean those persons living in the Dutch areas of The Netherlands, and I would also add in Belgium. Especially those locals working in the tourist service industry (who are the only ones with whom I have had experience speaking with).

What I notice the most is that they have a surprisingly good "American" accent. When I asked an Amsterdam waiter about this, he explained that most locals hear American English on TV from a surprisingly early age, maybe about the same time they are acquiring their native language; he explained that, because the media networks in those countries were/are considered too small to make dubbing foreign programs economical, many of the locals, from a very early age (in infancy, hearing it on TV) start hearing American spoken--because American TV programs were/are popular and the American English was not dubbed into the local language, unlike the larger countries like France, Germany, etc.

The waiter's explanation made sense to me because I've read that the brain is wired for maximum language acquisition at a very early age, which is how people learn their own language. I've also read that people who starting hearing or learning a language (I mean not their native language) at an early age (say in infancy from TV) tend to speak that foreign language with less of an "accent", perhaps none at all--whereas people in those countries who start learning a foreign language in school (say maybe after age 7 or so) will tend to speak the foreign language with an accent that is noticeable to native speakers of that language. My experience with virtually every tourist service industry person in the Netherlands and Belgium has been that, if you didn't know it, you would think (say, if you were speaking on the phone) that you're speaking with a native American speaker.

Thank you Kb1942 but I'll take my history lessons from someone more competent.

You've lost me with the Austria/Portsmouth/Holland thing and as for thinking that someone keen to flog a pair of tourist tat clogs to a gullible American is evidence of a profound love of Americans then I'm afraid that comes across as very naive.

And since JC thinks that a few comprehensible words in another language (Dutch) proves a point, here is some German: bier, auto, bank, wein, bratwurst, butter, tee, steak, gulasch, fondue, sauerkraut.

The point I was making was in agreement with you??!!!?? Insofar as the Indo-European link, specifically the Germanic branch, which shares similarities between the Celtic, Nordic and Germanic languages and therefore was the reason for posting the brief phrase in Dutch (we were specifically discussing the Dutch) to highlight the similarities in English. What you've posted in German is missing the point, bratwurst is similar to........sausage in English? And sauerkraut is similar to what? Fondue is fondue wherever you go and whatever language you speak. You've simply listed a selection of German words but I'm lost as to the point you're trying to illustrate, other than bank, butter, tee and steak.

This is an interesting article on a new survey of England's regional dialects:

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2019/nov/09/england-regional-dialect-survey-university-of-leeds

Personally I thought cack handed was a general British term although I've never considered it to refer to left handedness but rather a description of fumbling ineptitude.

The Swedes are close...but the Dutch are the hands down winner in the EU.

I wouldn't disagree with that, although I have limited exposure to the Netherlands. But my wife's entire family (except her), were born in Sweden, and everyone in her family that I've met speaks perfect English. Our niece married a Swede a few years ago, and when I first met him, at dinner our house in Maine, about 15 years ago, it seemed that he didn't speak English. But I think it was just that he was a little intimidated by the number of people at dinner. Next time I met him he seemed close to fluent, and now he's as fluent in English as anyone I know.

As to the Netherlands, I either read, or a Dutch person told me, that a major reason that the Dutch speak English so well is that they're such a small country and in no other country do the people speak Dutch, so they have to learn another language, and English is almost universal.

Spain continues to have one of the worst levels of English in Europe (El Pais)

For those interested in why Spain fails at English...

Croatia, Slovenia, Montenegro, Macedonia. In many of these countries, students begin learning English in 1st grade. We recently skyped with a man in Northern Macedonia at 2:30 in the AM, his time. Our group felt that at 2:30 AM, we wouldn't speak English as well as he did. He even used the term "paradigm shifts".

They do not even mention Slovenia, which in my personal experience ranks just after the Scandinavian countries and above Austria in English proficiency.

I am basing my answer to this on two factors in Europe: 1. the best and most pervasive English speakers outside of the UK and 2. what I've personally seen , witnessed, observed, etc over the course of 25 trips in 48 years.

My vote goes to the Dutch who speak the best English and most pervasively, plus one gets the feeling , though totally subjective, that they like or at least do mind not speaking English, which cannot be asserted for other European nationalities, not to the same extent.

The other question is, which nationality in Europe, generally speaking, ( it's generalisations, isn't it?) does not like speaking English, even it is taught or required in secondary school for those on the university track.

William of Orange and Queen Mary, both Protestant, and therefore acceptable to Parliament in 1688.

My experience is that most of Europe is much more interested in speaking American than English.

My experience is that most of Europe is much more interested in speaking American than English.

What do you mean? Are you suggesting that there's an option in school to learn American or English English? English is taught, the fact that many European speakers speak with an American twang is often a result of their own accent but also what they've picked up from film and TV from the US.

I'm pretty sure that most Europeans are happy to be competent enough in English without paying much thought into whether it's American or English.

We found The Netherlands and the Scandinavian countries had the most English spoken. They even used colloquialisms, joked with us. One who stood out doing that was a Stockholm bus driver.

There was a link to an interesting explanatory article about the situation in Spain in the article Carlos posted:

https://elpais.com/elpais/2018/12/17/inenglish/1545052143_282469.html?rel=mas

It sounds as if a shortage of qualified teachers in Spain is a significant issue. I haven't been to every country in Europe, but I've been to many in the last 4-1/2 years, and Spain stands out as a country where you are likely to encounter some very awkwardly-worded (though admittedly still understandable) permanent English-language signage in places where one would expect near perfection, such as museums. It's clear that there are some not-well-qualified people doing translations.

I wonder whether the existence of at least three widely-used regional languages (Catalan, Basque and Gallego/Galician) is a factor. Many people living in Spain are in a position of benefitting greatly from being fluent in one of those languages as well as Spanish/Castilian. When traveling across northern Spain, I found more restaurants with no English on the menu because (I assume) space is needed for both the local language and Spanish. I haven't been to Belgium, so I don't know whether something similar happens there with French/Flemish.

I vote for the Dutch. Darn near flawless English.

The Dutch, even back in the early seventies.

Of those where the official language is English, the Scots by far have the nicest accent, followed by those who live in Mansfield and Bridgnorth..

"...even in the early seventies." True, my experience too in 1971 when encountering the Dutch in Holland or in the hostels in Germany .

This thread was started last November and the previous post was in December. I don't know how I missed it or why it mysteriously appeared yesterday (possibly somebody edited a previous post), but language usage in Europe is a topic very dear to my heart, so I want to add some thoughts.

The Eurpean Union periodically surveys it's members as to their language skills. The latest of these reports, "Special Eurobarometer 386, EUROPEANS AND THEIR LANGUAGES REPORT" can be found by going to this webpage and clicking on Reports, then on the 5th item down, "Europeans and their Languages: Report (EN)".

There are a number of interesting facts to get from this report, most importantly, only 54% of Europeans report being able to communicate in any other language other than their first language, and only 25% report being able to communicate in two other languages. So much for everyone in Europe speaks lots of languages.

It is also interesting that, similar to the report that started this thread, the Dutch are the 2nd most multilingual country with 77% of the people reporting being able to communicate in two languages other than their mother tongue, second only to Luxembourg, at 84% (pg 15).

The report also shows (Pg 17) that small population countries, such as the Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden, Austria, etc tend to have a high number of persons able to speak in another language whereas larger countries tend to have smaller numbers of 2nd language speakers (Italy 38%, Spain 46%, and France 51%). Uncharacteristically, Germany, the largest population country, has 66% of the population speaking a 2nd language.

Unlike the Euronews report, the EU report does not say much about the level of spoken language ability in another language (like English). It does touch on the subject on pg 25, but not by country.

Just from my experience I would also cite the Scandinavians. It seemed the educated in metropolitan areas also spoke English, again from must personal experience.

Dutch/Netherlanders and Belgians. Many speak with pretty near a perfect California/American accent, because from an early age they heard un-dubbed American TV programs, those countries' TV markets were small enough that they didn't have the resources to dub American programs into the local language (the way they did in the larger TV markets: Germany, France). If that's what you hear on TV before you can walk and through your early years, you speak without an accent. Speaking with Dutch/Belgian locals (not just in the tourist service industry), I realize that if I couldn't see them, such as on a phone call, I'd assume I was speaking to a native American speaker.

I had one American co-worker who lamented that, despite the Dutch being very proficient in English, they wouldn't understand any of his sports analogies or pep-talks.