I'm sure that's a factor, but it's also a bit cultural. Countries with the highest proficiency tend to use subtitles in stead of dubbing for foreign language movies. Because of this, you get much more familiar with other languages. I learned most of my English from watching movies and the internet. I was pretty much fluent in English before I even started getting English classes in High School, so I never had to actively learn it.
I totally agree with this.
Pretty much everything is dubbed in France, Italy and Spain.
I also learned a lot of english by watching movies and series in the original language with subtitles.
Also smaller languages usually don't have a lively community around niche topics (specific games, cartoons, startups, programming, etc) so you end up in discussing things in English. Personally I learned English from fantasy books and WOW.
I noticed my English skills improving after switching from watching German dubs to the English originals. It's really unsettling when you go back and notice that all the movie dubs are done by what feels like a dozen people in total.
Well, I have a lot to thank to those British series running on our channels, and also Bristh evenings on RTP2, specially 'Allo 'Allo!, Mr Bean, The Avengers, Thunderbirds, Danger Mouse, The Saint, Poirot and many others.
It's not that straightforward. Finnish is wildly different from English, yet basically everybody there speaks English. And as late as the 1990s English proficiency in Germany was abysmal, particularly on the eastern side.
Because Finnland is a small country (5 million native speakers). They cannot afford to dub TV or movies, so every kid gets exposed to English every day. As soon as you have a somewhat rare hobby you need to read about it in English. There are many books not available Finnish, so people read the English one.
In Germany none of those are an issue, there is little exposure to English. English is a theoretical thing in school.
Quite some Finns over 40 years old have difficulties to speak fluent and somewhat correct English. (Source: I have worked in the high tech sector in Finland for 20+ years) That is caused by completely different grammar of Finnish compared to anything Germanic, Nordic, or Romanic and the fact that speaking was traditonally not taught a lot in Finnish schools.
English grammar has diverged a lot from the other Germanic languages, and its vocabulary is about 50/50 Germanic/Romance. And maybe things are different for Spanish and Italian, but French has had a huge Germanic influence (it is even named after the Franks that ruled it for a long time); e.g., there are many turns of phrase that you can translate word for word.
Exactly; what English shares with German is mostly words from a small village in the year 1000. You can talk about water, bread, beer and brothers, but anything more complex is out of the question. "Complex" and "question" are both latin-origin words for instance. So are "instance" and "origin".
I had a vastly easier time learning Italian than German as a native English speaker. Of course there were confounding variables, but I just found Italian to have a lot more that I could latch on to in the modern world.
"Yet your central point remains, the core of the language is Germanic."
Of those words, the ones with latin origins are:
* central
* point
* remains
* core
* language
* Germanic
I guess you can run some statistics on all this, but subjectively, to me, Italian felt much easier to learn because much if it - including the grammar - felt more familiar than German.
That is largely down to the choice of multiple words to express similar concepts in English (due to its mongrel roots), and those having subtly different meanings, hence the high information density in English.
So in one having access to an expansive enough vocabulary, one will often use fewer of the core words. Partially as a way to remove ambiguity in written English (which can be very difficult), partially to write a shorter sentence than would be the case using Germanic root words alone.
For the second phrase you quoted, I could have written 'the heart of the tongue', but that could be read to imply a different meaning.
I would say that anything harder is not beyond the ask.
It is just that our word list is now bigger, meanings have split, and we often use the newer words.
We can still say and ask the same things with the old words, but the extra vocabulary makes for richer discourse; and we're now more used to those choices.
In a situation where brevity and clarity is necessary (e.g. dangerous environments, modern warfare), the language quickly strips itself to its core - without having to think about it. Even "mind the gap".
I think it is the opposite - everybody is speaking english a bit, so less people bother to test or obtain any formal proof. And google translate makes it easier to get away with poor English when communicating.
Also we are in an age in which native english speakers are a minority, so what is good english will inevitably change.
English is on course to eat up smaller languages. Mass communication has brought the world closer together, and with that, diversity is lost. It’s too early to say whether it’s for better or for worse, but here we are.
Going in the reverse direction - "a community speaks one language that then splits to two mutually unintelligible languages" seems so destructive that standardising on one language seems like an obvious and massive win for humanity at large.
But by raw number of languages standardising on English is probably not ideal. Probably some hybrid of Chinese grammar, Korean alphabet and Latin pronunciations would have been my pick for example.
Korean pronunciation is hard. Also, maybe the pronunciation is deterministic, but the rules are non trivial. Indeed, there's some recent changes that made the orthography more complex (to keep orthographic forms more consistent across different inflected forms).
The pronunciation may be deterministic for any given speaker, but different speakers can pronounce the same words differently. Not only differences in the national standards of North and South Korea, but also non-standard speech in different regions. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_dialects
Orthography becomes irrelevant as soon as you use Hangul to write a language entirely different from Korean, which wouldn't have the same inflected forms.
Language standardization is not something that exists.
You could hope for merging of communities that create an unified language, but whenever two communities are not completely merged, each will coin new words, the pronunciation will drift, etc.
That is because locutors create languages, not ruling bodies.
Examples of that include canadian french, and english as spoken in Europe, for which many words are not known to native english speakers.
I once had someone ask me what the "preterite" of a certain verb was. I was able to guess what she meant, but I definitely did not know that word from my experience speaking English.
This is kind of a borderline case, since the term "preterite" is recognized by English grammarians as a synonym of "simple past tense", but to use it probably is an influence by e.g. German Präteritum or French prétérit (which seems to be used in teaching English even though the syntactically corresponding French verb form is called the "simple past").
Of course language standardization is something that exists.
You get a ruling body to declare a particular manner of speaking as the preferred one, mandate that it be taught to children in school and prevent anyone who speaks differently from appearing in mass media. After a generation, you have children who grew up speaking non-standard with their parents but standard with their peers in school. Many of them will speak standard with their children, so non-standard becomes something you use to speak to your grandparents. Then the grandparents die and almost everyone who speaks non-standard fluently doesn't use it regularly, so they forget. The next generation grows up barely aware that the standard way to speak is not the only way.
All of that doesn't completely stop natural language change from occurring, but it strongly constrains the range of possible variation. Locutors may create languages, but ruling bodies can tell them which language to create.
Because, being french, we actively do it, and it is an utter failure. People do not know the ruleset they were supposedly taught, new words largely come from the society as opposed to the institution, and thus the institution mostly acknowledges things after the fact.
From that pov, the thing you describe looks like a pipe dream.
What's interesting about France is the people who think they don't speak much less understand the local dialect - who think it's dead or dying - but then you actually record them talking to their children, and lo and behold, they're passing dialect on to their children.
Still, the descendants of emigrants who learnt the dialect of their parents can only understand the older generation, not their peers.
> You get a ruling body to declare a particular manner of speaking as the preferred one, mandate that it be taught to children in school and prevent anyone who speaks differently from appearing in mass media.
The Académie Française is responsible for defining the proper spelling of words and update the intricate grammar rules.
At some point the Éducation Nationale adopts the changes and requires that all children learn using the new rules.
Eventually style guides of major newspapers and TVs are updated as well.
This has worked mostly until the reform of the 1990s which is controversial. I think the Éducation has only recently started to enforce it (15 years later). Many publications still use or tolerate the old style. Microsoft office gives you two dictionaries to chose from.
So basically this has worked until people started to actively go against it...
this makes no sense when "the ruling body" is located in a country that's different than where a large body or even the majority of speakers are located. see spanish or french.
Italian is mostly an invention. The language itself has changed very little in 700 years because it was born as an hybrid of a few Italian "dialects" (as we call them, but they really are proper languages). For a very long time the language was only used by a very small minority of elites and litterates. It only became a widely spoken language after the second word war through a explicit governmental effort and through the television.
And the language is explicitly standardized by the Accademia della Crusca.
Still you are not wrong, now that it is widely spoken, it is likely that the language will mutate quickly (and signs are already visible).
That's really not true. Many people I know also speak English, but that doesn't mean that they somehow forget how to speak their own language. If anything, small communities with an own language tend to be fiercely proud of that language, and do everything in their power to protect it [see e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low_German]. And if these languages do disappear, it tends to be because the national language is taught in schools and slowly replaces it in younger generations.
I’m a speaker of one of the smaller languages, and every educated person I know lament the inability to express themselves without resorting to English idioms. It isn’t that they don’t exist, some people are great at my language, it’s just that something like 99% of the movies I watch, podcasts I listen to, or papers I read are in English. I simply am much better at high level English than my own language. Colloquial English not so much though.
It is a different language, notably it's a northern Germanic language so the compatibility is fairly high. It also isn't mutually intelligible with English at all. I should maybe just say it's Swedish.
English started out life as a Germanic language but has changed somewhat over the last 1500 years. For example scir gerefe which becomes shire reeve and eventually sheriff. Yes, Rosco P Coltrane and company have a job title that is over 1500 years old. A shire is roughly a county in modern terms. For example Devonshire, Lanarkshire, Sir Fynwy etc in Britain. That last is Welsh.
Look at words like day, tag, dag and so on in the various Germanic languages. When you see that in English, the letter g morphed into y in a lot of words, it makes sense and of course we have to allow for some rather random spelling in the past and a great vowel shift or two. I live in Yeovil which was recorded as gifle (a fork in a river) in about 900. The nearby river Yeo seems to be named after the town which is named for its location on a feature of the river ...
These islands from 55 BC to 1066 AD became a revolving door to various invasions, some of which included Swedes and Danes generally as vikings, Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Italians (Romans) and any other tom, dick or harry that could find a boat and fancied duffing up a few Britons and settling down and raise a few apples and chickens! When the Northmen - Norsemen - Normans ie Duke William of Normandy turned up in 1066 they eventually did the job properly and ... eventually became English themselves and simply gave the language a bit of a twist. For example we have both Saxon and Frankish (French) words for many things eg meat: cow and beef, sheep and mutton, chicken and errr chicken, pig and pork.
I think that because English has had so many influences in the past that it has developed a certain flexibility that many languages do not. It is also a relatively new language - only 1500 years old! I learned Latin at school for several years, along with French and lived in Germany for 10 years (off and on). English can be warped and twisted and generally abused and yet the meaning remains intact better than some other languages.
The ultimate irony here is that I am talking about the new kid language on the block on HN!
As someone who grew up in a low german area I can tell you it basically already died.
My mothers understand the local low german. When visiting the village where she's from you can still hear some old people using it but I have a hard time understanding.
English still hasn't eaten up Irish, Scottish and Welsh. What languages are threatened, aside from those already rendered weak by settler invasions (e.g. in the US and Australia) which are surely not part of your concern mentioned here. (I think they must be excluded since it's not relevant to the topic of the article and because you refer to "mass communication bring[ing] the world closer".)
> English still hasn't eaten up Irish, Scottish and Welsh.
Yes, it definitely has. Ireland has (optimistically) ~1-2% native Irish speakers.
Welsh is spoken by maybe 20-30% of people living in Wales. I couldn't find a number for native/fluent speakers, but it is certainly much less than that figure - probably similar to the Irish one.
Scottish isn't even a language. There are languages called 'Scots' and 'Gaelic'. Again, both a spoken by a small minority.
Can confirm that this is the case in India. In fact it's much worse - due to a long history of colonization, most govt. services and education are exclusive to English speakers. Due to this unchallenged linguistic apartheid, public education is slowly switching over to "English medium", which is increasingly creating a class of nowhere men, who neither know their own languages nor English. This structural discrimination has knock on effects on the economy which are as yet unknown, and unexplored (due to geopolitical reasons IMO).
India, due to its deeply colonial state apparatus, is well on its way to losing most of its languages in the coming century. I think this is also the case with African nations - which might explain why the sub-continent (not just India) and Africa share so much in terms of human development indicators.
> Due to this unchallenged linguistic apartheid, public education is slowly switching over to "English medium", which is increasingly creating a class of nowhere men, who neither know their own languages nor English. This structural discrimination has knock on effects on the economy which are as yet unknown, and unexplored (due to geopolitical reasons IMO).
Oh, come on: you’re saying that teaching English to Indian students makes them illiterate in both their regional dialect and in English? You’re going to need to cite something like that, and a link that tries to correlate “poor countries often speak European languages” to “they’re poor because they’re not speaking whatever they originally used to” (instead of “their language is probably a byproduct of being colonized, and they’re poor because of that and not because European languages have some inherent linguistic deficiency”). And if we’re talking about anecdotal evidence, I suggest you take a look at the graduates of top “English-medium” institutions of India: many of them are multilingual.
As it stated in an article, probably it is not a very representative example of the general population. People taking an online English tests probably already feel to need one.
From my experience, English has been mostly useless in these countries as far back as I can remember. Even in touristy Paris, there are plenty of places where nobody speaks a word of English and this gets even 'worse' when you venture outside of cities. I'm from the country with the highest English proficiency (Netherlands), so I'm used to everyone speaking English. The benefit of this though, is that I can do basic stuff, like ordering coffee, in about 6 languages.
I wonder, though, whether the conclusion from the data is correct. It could be that more people are getting access to the internet, so even people who didn't have a reason to learn English half a decade ago are now looking for courses online.
Another article on that page https://qz.com/1213443/the-world-is-getting-better-at-englis... lists English proficiency by country. English proficiency is measured by average score on a test by a certain English testing company, which is obviously a flawed measure but ^\_o_/^.
No one cares about perfect English, queen's English, when speaking with Europeans. The place it matters is in writing, where improper constructions can be really irritating. And writing well is a real skill.
It is not that they are failing in English, rather that they are less dependent on foreign content, having localized versions from whatever might be relevant.
As polyglot speaker, I am really thankfully to have been brought up learning multiple languages.
English only got relevant during the last century, and as human history is full of different kinds of lingua francas throuhout the milenias, others will follow.
I have a similar background and the wealth of the content that's not in English is incredible and often missed.
From an outsider perspective, the time it took for British media and the political class to take note of the European sentiment on the issue of brexit was around 1 year. It was as if they just found out there was an non-English web out there..
Yes, if countrie's abilities to speak English are lower than what would be ideal, proficiency of any other language in English speaking countries is abysmal.
Maybe the US has a higher number, but a lot of those are due to family, not to education.
English is dominant now, and as you say history shows the dominant lingua francas changes over time - all the time. But I don't think another existing nation's language will take over. Not Spanish, Arabic, Mandarin, etc. Instead, I think an evolved version of English will dominate in 100-200 years time.
We already have many localised Englishes across the world, American, Australian, Indian, various pidgin English, but also in politics, business, social media there are "New Speak" version of English in those contexts.
One of these will evolve to be the lingua franca of the young connected people and dominate. And then be superseded by the next evolved language.
Once we colonize Mars and elsewhere there will be some interesting forks in languages I am sure.
I think spanish and English could end up merging in some ways honestly. There's already so many words of similar origin, geographical proximity in the Americas and already the phenomenon of Spanglish has existed a long time. I think it would take at least a few hundred years though.
Important to note that this has probably happened before with other popular languages. The way you describe the hypothetical future of English sounds a lot like you could be talking about Latin. The phrase lingua franca itself came about to describe a very similar story.
As a Spanish person, I can confirm that average English proficiency in Spain is poor in absolute terms. It has often been reported to be the country that speaks English worst in the EU, and it may very well be (although the French also deserve a honorable mention). But I find the claim that it has been declining since 2014 very difficult to believe, to say the least.
English is studied in primary school, which wasn't the case 20 years ago, let alone 50, so young people all have at least a minimal level whereas most people that are now passing away don't speak any English at all. This alone should be an important factor pushing average proficiency up. The coming of Netflix, HBO and their ilk in the last few years have made viewing TV series in English much more common (regular TV typically only offers dubbed versions). I teach at a university in English, ten years ago we didn't even offer that possibility and now demand is steadily increasing.
OK, I don't have actual data, they do... but given the limitations of their data (acknowledged in the piece itself), I'm taking it with a huge grain of salt.
20 years ago not many in Spain and France ( or even Germany ) would speak any English. May be they do, but may be they were too afraid, or refuse to speak as in the case of French.
20 years later literally everybody in ( Western ) Europe speaks English. I could go on the street and ask for directions, in places that are not cities or tourist attraction. Even the French. They may not be proficient at it, but they do understand and can do basic communication.
So I dont see any decline. And Thinking back I am surprised at how fast the world has evolved! ( Which also means I am getting old .... )
Joined this summer an international organization in Rome, Italy. I was quite surprised by the quality of the English skills in here. Like,... In our African countries, not knowing English/French is a question of whether you want to live a miserable life or no. Like, we have kids who failed their studies for just 45 hours of English practice each year starting grade 6.
I think that's the key difference between countries: some are compelled to be proficient in English because it is a necessity in order to get a descent life. Some sees it as just a need to compete.
I really understand. It might be also difficult for a great civilization like the Italian one to admit that they need to adapt to other civilization, speak English, adopt this language in order to express their ideas ...
Italian here. I don't think pride is the reason. We may be proud of our food but we use any language we need, even without knowing it. I guess many people had experiences with Italians delusional about their English skills.
The point probably is that those people don't need English in their life so they never invest in learning it.
English is studied in primary school, which wasn't the case 20 years ago...
That's tricky. Years ago primary extended from 1st to 8th grades (6 to 14 y.o. aprox.) so English, that started in 6th was primary. Now 6th to 8th have been moved to ESO.
Anyway I just checked with my son and he started in Infantil, so it's really soon.
The real issue is qualification. To really understand and speak English you need to learn pronuntiation properly. And that's the weakest link in our system. Most teachers have no idea how English is really pronounced and wouldn't be able to understand a native speaker to save their lives. It's impossible to learn English from someone that can't understand or speak it.
I believe it was Aguirre that proposed a plan to invite thousands of native speakers to teach English in Madrid. Of course everybody attacked her as usual whatever she says... I don't like her either, but that was a good idea for once.
This! The reason Germany has a high level of proficiency for a country that doesn’t translate media (movies, tv shows etc don’t act as language learning agent), it has a deep and well trained set of teachers. How? Famously the last German emperor insisted that every kid learn English in school. Over 100 years later and this has lead to well trained teachers, who can teach kids properly.
I guess the take away is that teaching a whole country a new language takes time and is hard to accelerate.
It's more general than for learning a language. For a whole country, teaching quality is a virtuous circle, you can't simply put a lot of money and expect inmediate results, but need to iterate through generations. That's why I think importing a lot of native speakers was a good idea: you can step ahead iterations.
Sweden started after WW2 and it is way ahead of Germany. So I’d say it is possible to accelerate. I think English really started to take hold in the 60s and 70s. Relatively low educated people born in the 1950s can make themselves understood in a pinch
Source? Although that sounds like something Willhelm II. would have done he couldn't make laws on his own and I think education was a state matter anyway.
At least it was according to the constitution but that doesn't mean much. Often laws that modified the 1871 and 1918 constitutions did not change its text but overrode its meaning. Imagine the US constitution but longer you get to hunt down the amendments yourself.
This is true. While I learned English in the written form in my teens and was able to somewhat understand movies in English, I only became proficient in it in spoken form after I joined a guild in an online MMO game and everybody talked through TeamSpeak. Good times :)
The written form of English and the way words are pronounced are so different it must be a nightmare to learn in some ways. I can recall when I was progressing through school even often seeing written words that I had never heard before and having no idea to pronounce them and would ask someone and the answer would be like, oh that's a French word and the 'g' is silent ( for example a word like benign). It's actually pretty bizarre to think about it now but realizing this has given me even more respect for people who learn English as a second language. Honestly I kind of feel like the language could be simplified and made more efficient for future generations and non native speakers to learn.
The hard part is that you have many vowels. In Spanish there are only five. Understanding is often done by elimination. If I can't discard a word because I can't tell if it's bar or bore or beard or bird or bear or beer, unless context helps, I'll simply stall.
That's why I consider native teachers to be the most powerful advantage. At school they insist too much in grammar, that's important, but the foundation is how the language sounds.
I hate movies with original language and subtitles. I've used them with subtitles also in English with great results to learn.
But nothing can replace a teacher that corrects your pronuntiation as you speak and repeats the right sounds as many times as you need.
Also when I'm watching a movie for pleasure, I like to watch and listen, not to read.
A while? I've done it for years and still don't like it. I'm not saying I can't do it, just that it's super annoying for me. I don't enjoy visuals if I need to read. It's totally anti-usabilty.
It's funny because as American kids are learning to read and ask what a word is we are told "sound it out". It usually works. But it definitely doesn't work the other way around, trying to spell a word by how it sounds. I had a Portuguese friend online once that spelled "awesome", "hawsom" and we had a good laugh because he felt embarrassed but we had to assure him it's still spelled wrong but still sounds right if you read it out loud.
If an American or Brit has passable Spanish, but (of course) excellent English skills, would this help them in the Spanish job market? Assuming of course they could get an appropriate visa?
I suppose you mean in the tech job market? Sure, I think it would help and it would be easy for them to find jobs. Although an American or Brit would find the salaries here very low, and work hours (at least in most companies) too long. Many Spanish tech graduates do the reverse, migrating to the UK (or, to a lesser extent, the US) for better salaries and conditions. Although Brexit is making many of those who went to the UK return or migrate elsewhere.
Thanks for your reply. I'm sorry to hear the hours are so long. My family is Spanish-American and whenever we try to accomplish anything bureaucratic from the US, it's impossible and takes forever, as I'm sure you know. I guess I hoped that the culture that makes things impossible to get done was because people were working shorter hours and had an easier work life?
Now I'm really confused. Or is it that bureaucratic Spain works short hours and other workers do long hours?
The latter is quite close to reality, indeed. State and regional bureaucracy offices typically open only 5 hours, from 9 to 14 (their workers work some more, but typically no more than 7.5 hours in theory, and probably less in practice) which makes them really inconvenient as you typically have to split your workday to go. And in many of those they work very, um... relaxedly. With long coffee breaks, smoking breaks, random breaks... but it's something specific of these workers, the rest of Spain doesn't generally work like that.
Bureaucracy is actually the single thing I hate most about Spain. I'm a professor at a university and the sheer amount of bureaucracy is staggering, asphyxiating at times. In fact it's a relevant factor making me work longer than I should as too much time is spent dealing with that. In industry most people don't have to deal with much bureaucracy, though, unless they're company owners or self-employed.
In industry, people tend to work long hours: there is still a culture of presentialism with remote work being frowned upon in many companies, suboptimal traditional work timetables with a long lunch break make many people return home way too late, and the threat of unemployment (not so much in the tech sector) and the need for money in an economy with modest salaries and high housing prices makes workers accept lots of (paid or sometimes unpaid) overtime.
If you're seriously considering moving, maybe it's a matter of being selective (supposing you can search while holding your current job) and taking time to find a company with more modern ways, that doesn't value presentialism and overtime. There is a growing minority of companies like that. If you mention these things as priorities in interviews, companies that want workers in their posts until late in the evening will probably filter themselves out.
If you do score a good company that allows for work-life balance and provides a good salary for Spanish standards (even if it's low for American standards), quality of life in Spain is excellent. Good climate in most places, good public healthcare, amazing and relatively cheap food both in supermarkets and restaurants, good bars and nightlife, nice natural landscapes and hiking places (especially in the north), decent public transport (not stellar compared to e.g. Germany but much better than in America) and in most cities you can go outside at 3 am and feel safe walking in 90% of the city (100% in some). I have had offers to work in America for several times my salary here and haven't even considered them.
I have visited Spain a few times over the last 20 years. I do not speak Spanish and I try to get by speaking English (these are few days at a time visit, and not long term stay).
From this one man's experience, it is not that Spain has regressed in its proficiency with English, but I find that other southern European countries (particularly Portugal) has upped the ante - a LOT.
To compare Paris (I understand it does not represent all of France, but it is one view point), 20 years ago I would have difficult time in ordering in a restaurant. A hardship many English-speaking visitors today will find hard to empathize with. In most places in Paris today I can get by with English and get complex transactions done.
Portugal has truly baked-in English proficiency into their national psyche now. Zealotry aside, this enables Portugal to further their economic and cultural interests more, I think.
> In most places in Paris today I can get by with English and get complex transactions done.
First times I went to France (90's), there were people I met who genuinely did not understand English at all - even simple words -, and I had shopkeepers who, when my stumbling French was also insufficient, pulled strangers off the street to translate, and at least in smaller towns it sometimes took multiple tries to find someone.
By my last few trips it'd become hard to practice my French because people switch to English the moment I stumble in French...
I agree, it sounds plausible to me that Spain has fallen back in relative terms because neighboring countries have been more successful in improving their English. However, the linked article implies that English proficiency in Spain has declined in absolute terms, which is what I find difficult to believe.
When I visited a customer in Finland, I noticed that everyone in the office spoke English to each other. I asked if they were just being courteous since I was there. They laughed, and said no, the employees came from all over the world and English was the only language they had in common.
- of course Europe's largest economies are going to be the least incentivized to adopt English due to their larger internal market both in terms of culture as well as economics.
- The International Englishes (plural) are different from both UK and US English. The scientific community has its own 'dialect', and the EU political/administration/diplomatic English is different still. Standard tests based on US/UK spelling/grammar/vocabulary might not capture these nuances.
> Standard tests based on US/UK spelling/grammar/vocabulary might not capture these nuances.
Standardized tests don't do well at assessing language fluency in general. For one example, my sister was born in the US, grew up in the US, was educated in English, spoke English (exclusively) at home, and graduated from the University of Pennsylvania. She failed the State Department's test of fluency in English.
Similarly, I know a number of fluent Spanish speakers who got caught up in high school Spanish because they didn’t have an understanding of grammar to the level of what was required in the class…
It’s interesting that the countries which score lowest are where the Romance languages are spoken. I wonder what the reasons for that are. FYI I’m an English speaker who speaks 2 other Germanic languages and Spanish. The Spanish I find by far the hardest and that could also be reversed. Just an hypothesis.
I think it's partially what another commenter said - the EU market means that learning other EU languages is as much of a priority. Also, the romance languages can overlap quite a bit - my Spanish wife can have a reasonably detailed conversation with an Italian where they only speak their native languages.
Weird, I had the opposite experience - I moved to Spain after Uni but during Uni I worked in Germany for half a year.
I found Spanish much easier to learn than German because the grammar is simpler and the words are often similar to Latin words which are in turn similar to English words.
I never had to use Flash Cards when learning Spanish, they were vital for German.
For example, Mano is similar to Manual which is related to the Hand, obviously in German it is simpler as the word is the same.
However, negocio is similar to negotiate which reminds me of business... Betrieb on the other hand - probably going to need the flash cards.
My personal observation of people who watch lots of anime with subtitles but only understand a handful of Japanese words and can't pronounce them correctly indicates that passive exposure to a language isn't enough to learn much. You also need to try and practice using it yourself.
I agree to a certain extent but keep in mind that Japanese grammar is completely different from any latin based language. That makes really difficult to asimilate full sentences, locate where the action or the subject are, etc.
It's way more than visual. For example, Japanese plurals aren't evident and need to be understood from context. Another example is the word order, in Japanese, the verb goes at the end of the sentence. Add to it Hiragana and Katakana characters and it becomes quite difficult to learn.
You're listing differences between Japanese and English, but my sample of anime fans who don't understand Japanese also includes Chinese and Korean speakers, for whom writing system or verb-final word order, respectively, are shared features. Different grammar from English isn't unique to languages with non-Latin writing system either. Latin itself has much freer word order, enabled by a more complex case system than English.
Personally, I don't think grammar is a large hurdle to learning to understand a new language. You can learn once that Japanese usually has the verb at the end of the sentence, and afterwards use a dictionary whenever you don't understand the word at the end of a sentence to learn a new verb. But using a dictionary is already a step up from passive consumption. Most people just want to enjoy the show, so they're not learning much.
I like to watch anime in Japanese because of the sound, but I don't know any Japanese so I look at subtitles, usually in English. I don't expect to learn any language in this way.
Knowing grammar helps. I'm Italian and Spanish and French have such similar grammars that learning to read them was mostly a matter of building a vocabulary. Listening to French is more complicate as its hard to find spaces between words. Talking is both simple (similar sounds except a few ones) and complex (subtle differences in how to build sentences.) Writing is the most difficult skill. Everything has to be almost perfect.
English wasn't only a matter of vocabulary. The differences in grammar are large enough that building and understanding a sentence requires to think in a really different way. I got a shot at German a couple of times. The differences are an order of magnitude larger and I never had the time to go beyond the basics.
(Though i think the correct pseudo translation would be “In English also verb can end go”. Subtle difference, but more like German - und auf den Punkt.)
Chinese grammar is refreshingly simple. I'm currently learning Chinese and it was shocking to me how easy it is to sensibly express ideas with very basic grammar (and some really funny idiosyncratic phrasings like… dong bu dong).
I studied Japanese for 10 years from Primary School until end of high school.
I can remember when we watched television in class there would be no subtitles. The teacher would pause the video every 2 minutes or so and then ask someone in the class to explain what had just happened during those 2 minutes.
Usually it would be stuff like a news broadcast or similar the teacher had taped from Japanese tv broadcast.
You could mostly translate things because they were talking about relatively mundane concepts which were similar to what we had been learning. "That clip was about the opening of a railway station in this prefecture etc."
I can remember one lesson the teacher played Mononoke Hime in class, this was a pretty big anime movie which had just come out at the time it was full of references to Japanese mythology and folklore, no one is class had any idea what was going on in the story because it was full of language we'd never heard before.
The other thing is that anime tends to use a lot of informal language, which differed a lot to the more formal speech we learnt in class. So I suspect it would be very difficult to learn Japanese from Anime alone.
Not only that, there are certain things that need to be taught because you will never figure them out on your own. For instance, in English the voiced/voiceless distinction in consonants involves differences in vowel length and aspiration in addition to voicing. If your mother tongue relies entirely on voicing, as all Romance languages do, then you will interpret the other features as an affectation when in fact they have an important phonemic role.
The difference would be that the European countries where people are watching subtitled TV are also teaching English in school. So you have both the proper education, as well as repeated, practical reinforcement and exposure.
You're right, here's my anecdotal evidence about it. I've already sent this comment here, but it's been 4 years ago so here it is again:
I live in a small town near the serbian-hungarian border and we can watch both Hungarian and Serbian TV stations. In Serbia movies are subtitled (so you can hear English language all the time) while in Hungary movies are dubbed (so you can't hear anything other than hungarian language on TV). Serbian families who live here watch mostly serbian TV and hungarian families watch mostly hungarian TV stations. Ask any English teacher here and they will all tell you that there is very clear distinction between level of knowledge in serbian vs hungarian kids. They all live in the same town, go to the same school, the only difference is that those kids who watched serbian TV stations had much bigger exposure to english language as opposed to those who watched hungarian TV stations.
That's interesting. I wonder if the fact that Serbian is an Indo-European language and Hungarian is not has any influence? Not a linguist and not familiar with either language, so just a semi-random question.
I doubt it. To anyone other than a paleolinguist, Serbian and Hungarian are approximately equally distant from English. And the Finns don't have trouble learning English.
Language families refer to the provenance of a language, the oldest vocabulary. That doesn't automatically mean it will be easy or hard to learn if you speak another language within or without that family. For instance if you speak Spanish you may find it easier to learn Tagalog than if you speak Malagasy (Madagascar), even though Malagasy and Tagalog are in the same family and Spanish is not.
I'm Dutch and have a close friend who's Hungarian. His English is as good as mine. The only impression I got is that he needed to actively seek out opportunities to speak English whereas in The Netherlands you're bombarded with opportunities.
I do think it helps a bit though, but it's easily trumped by opportunity itself.
Similar experience here. Growing up in Bulgaria as kids, my friends and I mostly learned English from Discovery Channel and Cartoon Network. Because it was pirated or probably too expensive to be translated, the content wasn't dubbed and there were no subtitles for most shows.
A few years later in high school when visiting a school in Germany, I was shocked to find out that the kids there were watching Discovery Channel completely dubbed in German.
> My pet theory is that English proficiency is much better in countries where movies are subtitled, not dubbed.
That is how I learned the basics of the english language when I was a kid. Here in Portugal movies are subtitled.
Incidentally, I went to Milan once to participate in this thing, and neither Italians, Spanish, French, Polish and Russian people could understand each other. I speak a little bit of everything (almost, had to use pseudo-english with the polish and russian) so I had to do the translations. Talk abou information assimetry: I knew everything that happened because I was the unnoficial translator.
The "best" part of that trip was to have to watch Four weddings and a Funeral dubbed in Italian! It went some months before I was able to tolerate italian language again..
I was horrible in English while at school and internet access wasn't widely spread. Regular use is pretty important in my opinion.
Instantly switching languages is hard though. You end up with sentences that make absolutely no cheesecake and fail you grammar basic if you switch to your native tongue again. Often happens to me after work when I was consuming content in English for a longer period of time.
Nearly everything is localized here though and it is very true that dubbed content suddenly feels very artificial. Older generations have a comparably bad English proficiency, even if they once excelled in school.
<quote>Instantly switching languages is hard though.</quote>
You don't say... when I'm in a situation where I have to speak two different languages to different people at the same time I sometimes end up using the wrong language with the wrong person. Really funny in retrospect but it greatly confuses everyone.
Native English speaker (English) here and I've just had to wipe my screen after reading your second paragraph. Pretty much the only reason I can tell you are not a native writer is by the content and the points you are raising.
Non-native speakers are more easily recognizable in their language use when they need to use proper vocabulary during emotional conversations.
My favorite mistake (made by yours truly):
"I feel upset."
"Oh, I also feel angry."
"I said that I feel upset..."
"Yea, angry, me too"
"It's not the same."
"Wait, what? How isn't it?"
Emotional conversations with a native English speaker are harder because of this. I learned to get a bit better at it as my SO speaks Dutch as well.
Having the same conversation in Dutch with the same words and sentences yielded very different discussions. IMO, the research that people talk and think more rationally in a non-native language rings true.
I can see how that did not work out well! To be honest me and my SO can diverge like that without invoking another language. Usually it is me expressing bewilderment.
But you still had to have conversations with people to fully learn right? As someone learning Spanish I think I've hit a hard limit in terms of of my progress from just consuming media in Spanish and decided I need to start taking one on one tutoring lessons to really continue my progress.
A Swede will tell a joke. The swedish congregation and maybe some other Scandinavians will laugh. Then a moment later the English-speakers will laugh when it's translated into Englisg, then everyone else gradually, depending on how long each other language's translation takes.
The country is split linguistically between Dutch speakers in the northern Flemish region, and French in the southern Walloon region.
The Flemish region's television stations and cinemas run mostly subtitled programs (really, anything outside of children's shows and content made in the region or in the Netherlands).
In the French-speaking areas, the media companies and cinemas buy their content from France, where the vast majority of it comes overdubbed.
As a result, the Flemish have a much stronger command of English than their French-speaking counterparts.
That said, the French-speaking Belgians, at least in my experience of living there for a long time, speak English much better than the French.
A lot of that has to do with how international the country is, where Brussels not only hosts many international institutions, but also a lot of companies have their EU HQs there. Many people need to speak English to get jobs with these firms, so it drives up the English competency among the local population.
Though I'm willing to agree with this as a general idea, I would be cautious to state it as a fact.
I've encountered many Flemish Belgians who openly admit they can understand English but cannot speak it well. A member of my close familiy who works in aviation occasionally rants about "having to do everything in English", a position that I cannot begin to understand.
Whereas I've worked for a Flemish Belgian company that also had Walloon Belgian customers who communicated not stubbornly in French (as the stereotype would suggest) but in professional English.
I believe that the language learning is affected by the generations. There has been a disregard, acceptance and now (what I believe) a new disregard of foreign languages in Flanders. Though I do not have any numbers to back that up. That said the news recently reported an all-time low for Flemish Belgian students with regard to reading and sciences (https://www.vrt.be/vrtnws/en/2019/12/03/_dutch-is-the-key-to...). So there might be a correlation between the two subjects.
It would be very interesting to have data on this subject as Belgium indeed is a great place to study this phenomenon.
Maybe, you’ve also got to consider the fact that Flemish is more similar to English than French is, and cultural differences between French and Flemish/Dutch speakers overall (broadly overgeneralising, French people are salty that their language has been overtaken in relevance by English, while Dutch speakers are comfortable with the fact that their language was never all that important).
Not only English: we had subtitled French, German (with English subs mostly :) and English when I grew up; I watched a lot of English (BBC) and German tv which made me quite fluent in both from
a young age. French less so as I did not like French programs (now I do); I still understand most and when I am in France for a couple of weeks I can make myself understandable. Also; because I picked things up from listening, my pronunciation is good especially after spending some time in the region.
Can people really fully learn a language this way? I've been learning Spanish and taken this approach of consuming media (music and videos) and I'm even at a level where I can follow a well spoken Spanish speaker in a video but I have realized I'm still at a beginner stage in terms of having actual conversations with people. I don't think most people can really fully learn a language without a good deal of direct conversation with other speakers of the language.
It could be a correlation rather than a causation. Small countries don't have the financial justification to dub movies and they also must rely on english for professional reading material since there are not enough people to justify publication of local language books. They also tend to rely more on other countries for import and export. Therefore people have to know English just to be able to study and communicate.
The Spanish market is huge and so are other big influential countries like Japan, Germany or France which is still spoken in many other countries, mainly in Africa. So there is less incentive to learn English because everything is available in the local language.
There are other factors like closeness of the language to English(north European countries) and colonialism(the sub continent). The advancement of the Latin American economies makes Spanish a much more viable and influential competition to English so English becomes less necessary. You can even see it in popular culture where Spanish music and tv shows become popular all over the world. As a non Spanish speaker my random vocabulary in this language increased a lot during the last couple of years.
> Incidentally it also explains why native english speakers tend to have no idea about other languages.
I've learned traveling in foreign countries that simply learning the native words for please, thank you, hello, goodbye, yes and no goes a long way towards having a pleasant experience. The locals will go out of their way to be nice to you for making the effort.
It's also the reason why there's a moderate correlation (didn't actually research this) between small EU countries and English ability. Small countries are better, because they don't have the resources to dub their series.
This used to be more true than now. The Netherlands has been regressing a bit in their English speaking ability precisely because children tv shows aren't in English anymore (though there's still plenty of opportunity in NL, there simply used to be more).
When you think about it, now that the cold war is over, The United States can only benefit from a reduction of the perception that the country is a singular, dominant super power.
The more America appears to be ruled by bufoons and rednecks, the smaller the target on its back will get.
When the British empire mattered, English adoption was driven by England. In the 20th century, English was adopted because of the cold war, NATO, and business with American companies.
The rules for language prevalence will change, and soon, technology itself will become the arbiter of communication. Those that travel might learn to become multilingual, but many times, technology adoption precludes and obviates even travel.
> EF Education First, a Swedish company based in Switzerland that manages more than 600 language schools across 50 countries.
Wow, I remember the English First billboards in Shanghai around 2009-2010. They showed a white guy and a Chinese woman raising their hands together, and their arms were shackled together at the wrist with a really heavy rope.
This must have worked for the Chinese target audience, but I found it hilarious.
> There are some concerns, as Quartz’s Nikhil Sonnad noted about last year’s report, about how representative the data it collects and analyzes is of the general population of each country. “The proficiency scores are based on free online tests, so the people taking them are self-selected,” he wrote, “They are not a representative sample of the country’s citizens, and may instead represent a group that is particularly interested in English and has access to the internet.” Even so, Sonnad says “it is the best dataset available for measuring English ability across countries.”
This is a weird concern to raise -- the idea that EF's data isn't representative because it's pulled from a sample of citizens extraordinarily interested in English would strongly imply that the true proficiency level in every country is much lower than reported, and to a lesser extent that the gaps between countries are probably wider than reported.
> correlation doesn’t necessarily prove causation. Is it, as EF and others argue, that better English skills facilitate global trade and investment, which leads to growth and new jobs? Or is it that rich countries can invest more in bilingual education?
> This is a weird concern to raise -- the idea that EF's data isn't representative because it's pulled from a sample of citizens extraordinarily interested in English would strongly imply that the true proficiency level in every country is much lower than reported, and to a lesser extent that the gaps between countries are probably wider than reported.
No, if your samples aren't representative then any conclusion you draw can be flawed for thousands of different reasons and in all possible directions. Two examples.
1) Let's say that the top 1% of English speakers of countries A and B took the test. You say "the gaps then would be wider than reported". Wrong, even if in this 1% sample country A scores the highest, it might very well have lower overall proficiency. If proficiency is normally distributed, but has a much greater variance in country A than country B, the maximum of A will be higher than of B, even with a lower average.
2) Now you take the tests at time t and t+1. However, at time t the test was less popular, so only 0.5% of the top speakers took the test, while at t+1 1% of the top speakers took the test. You would conclude that a lower score a time t+1 implies that the skill got worse, while it might have very well improved by a lot.
(In fact, I'm pretty sure that's what happened. I never heard of EF before 2017, so I couldn't have taken the test before then)
> 2) Now you take the tests at time t and t+1. However, at time t the test was less popular, so only 0.5% of the top speakers took the test, while at t+1 1% of the top speakers took the test. You would conclude that a lower score a time t+1 implies that the skill got worse, while it might have very well improved by a lot.
I agree with this in full. I don't see what it's responding to in my comment, though.
> 1) Let's say that the top 1% of English speakers of countries A and B took the test. You say "the gaps then would be wider than reported". Wrong, even if in this 1% sample country A scores the highest, it might very well have lower overall proficiency. If proficiency is normally distributed, but has a much greater variance in country A than country B, the maximum of A will be higher than of B, even with a lower average.
I'm not following you here. I claimed that when the test pool for each country is strongly self-selected for interest in English, the gap between the countries' average proficiency levels (in reality) is very likely to be larger than the gap between those countries' average test scores. The test scores are suffering from restriction of range.
An example in which country A has higher test scores than B at the same time it has lower proficiency looks like an example of that phenomenon, not a counterexample.
If A and B have the same mean proficiency and different variance, and selection into the test pool is driven only by proficiency, then the country with higher variance will test better under this system while having the same mean proficiency, that's true.
English is just one of thousands of languages in this world.
Europe has many languages and most European countries trade most with their neighbours. IMHO it makes sense to learn the language of a neighbouring country before trying "fit the American mold" (and I say that from the UK).
The solution to this (assuming you see it as a problem in search of a solution) is to stop watching dubbed media. Content targeted at anyone over say 10 years just shouldn't be dubbed, period.
Language isn't merely vocabulary, grammar and pronounciation. It's also nuance in expression, proverbs, slang, idioms. All of this is lost when content is translated and dubbed. When a person in a US sitcom uses an idiom, the spanish dubbed content translates to a similar Spanish idiom. With subtitles not only do I get the pronounciation and vocabulary, I also see in the subtitles a best-effort mapping from the english idiom to the corresponding idiom in my native language.
I think this is solving itself automatically as movies and traditional TV gives way for youtube and netflix where dubbed content isn't as common.
I moved to France a few years ago. I did know that French don't know English as much as they do not want to speak English yet I am still amazed by how much. I think that the main reason for that is that they have their own French speaking view of the planet in which they happily live. There are French businesses, French universities and research, French (ex-)colonies, French tourism etc. One could say that the same are true for other countries, eg Germany where English are much more/better spoken, but apparently it's not like this and I have no explanation for that.
You're right French have everything dubbed in french, also English teachers are very bad, which doesn't help, I would say that most French kind of understand basic written English, but when spoken, it is so different than anything they heard that they are not able to translate sounds to the written words they might know.
French has a lot of words which are close or exactly the same as English, but doesn't sound the same or mean completely different things, which doesn't help. (example: 'argument' in English as in 'having an argument' and 'argument' in French as in 'ton argument ne mène nulle part' don't mean the same at all, other words can mean the same such as 'agile' but sounds like two different words when pronounced in French vs English)
And then you have pride (the wrong kind) coupled with the fear of sounding ridiculous, which is why 99% of French you hear speaking English has a very strong accent, they're not trying.
My two explanations (as a French): all English contents on the TV is dubbed and English classes often have 24+ students which makes it hard for the teacher to have everyone speaking (even a bit).
Whereas in Finland, subtitles on foreign TV programs are common and classes have less students (I think).
Thus I believe it entirely comes down to the government not being smart enough.
Or try the converse, in the UK almost all foreign language content is still dubbed.
Then for foreign language (French and German) classes in state schools in England around 1975 onwards:
We'd often have around 30 pupils.
Time was spend on learning vocabulary and set phrases, but mainly in the written form.
This would be from around age 10 (French) or 13 (German).
It was the first exposure to grammar concepts (verb, noun, etc).
Little time was spent on speaking the languages.
At the end of this most of us we still incapable to speaking the foreign language, let alone being literate in them!
I'm not sure to what extent it has improved since.
All my TV watching is on Freeview and I haven't seen anything dubbed in years. Where do you find dubbed media?
I agree that language teaching is terrible here though. The period you describe was particularly bad. The teaching of formal English grammar had become unfashionable but foreign languages continued to be taught using grammar concepts that nobody now understood in English. It was completely absurd.
There is a lot of foreign series and movies on BBC4. Lots of Nordic noir crime stuff. There are also many French shows: Engrenage/Spiral season 7 has just finished.
Much easier to catch these on iPlayer than freeview.
> I did know that French don't know English as much as they do not want to speak English yet I am still amazed by how much.
I hate it when I hear the stereotype "French people do speak English but they're not going to because they are so proud" (maybe not exactly what you're saying...). It's simply untrue. People who speak good English will very happy to practice whenever the opportunity shows up.
It's not easy to learn a foreign language, and most French people who didn't have the opportunity to study abroad, or who don't need English at their workplace don't speak English very well. However, I think most of them speak some English, as long as you're patient and don't expect them to be fluent. For many people, it's intimidating to speak English, even if they've learnt the basics at school.
> they have their own French speaking view of the planet
Indeed, they live in a country where they can get by using their own national language and most of them don't have enough opportunities to meet English speaking foreigners. Why should you expect them to learn your language, especially if you're the one moving there?
> Germany where English are much more/better spoken
English is hard for roman languages speakers. It seeems Italian, Spaniards, French have a harder time than Germans or Dutch...
Patience is definitely key and most people who only speak one language have no patience for someone who partially knows their language to talk to them. I've been learning Spanish and traveling in Latin America and the only people I can successfully have actual conversations with in Spanish are ones who also know English because they seem to understand what it's like to have trouble expressing themselves. I'll speak in Spanish and they listen even though I'm slower than a normal person and I'll do the same if they talk back to me in English.
You mean like English-native speaker have their own English speaking view of the planet in which they happily live. There are English businesses, English universities and research, English (ex-)colonies, English tourism etc. ?
That's exactly what the parent is saying conceptually.
The mega cultures with their larger populations are able to live within their own bubbles more easily than smaller countries. They typically produce a lot more media content to fulfill their own demand, as one example. It's true whether we're talking the US, Britain, Germany, France, Spain, Russia, China, Japan and so on.
This reminds me the comments in the different app or video game stores (like steam). Spanish people ALWAYS complain about apps or games not being translated to Spanish and vote them very low because of it. I can't understand how people haven't realized yet how important is to know English nowadays.
> France, Spain, and Italy’s English skills are on the decline: study (qz.com)
No, they simply are not [2]
France has INCREASED as per the report, Spain has dropped.
"English proficiency levels are rising in the European Union, with more EU countries than ever in the Very High Proficiency band. France’s scores have improved for the past two years"
That's good news for Québec where they have made laws to treat English speakers as second class citizens. Businesses in Québec are advised not to greet customers with "Bonjour-Hi" but just "Bonjour" to preserve the identity & French culture in Québec.
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[ 5.9 ms ] story [ 283 ms ] threadEven weirder is this re-phrasing: „The more integrated into the global economy you are, the less you need english“
Greetings from Austria!
In Germany none of those are an issue, there is little exposure to English. English is a theoretical thing in school.
Quite some Finns over 40 years old have difficulties to speak fluent and somewhat correct English. (Source: I have worked in the high tech sector in Finland for 20+ years) That is caused by completely different grammar of Finnish compared to anything Germanic, Nordic, or Romanic and the fact that speaking was traditonally not taught a lot in Finnish schools.
I had a vastly easier time learning Italian than German as a native English speaker. Of course there were confounding variables, but I just found Italian to have a lot more that I could latch on to in the modern world.
We get 'Fort' from French, but the equivalent concept 'Stronghold' has Germanic root words and construction.
What does that prove?
Yet your central point remains, the core of the language is Germanic.
Of those words, the ones with latin origins are:
* central
* point
* remains
* core
* language
* Germanic
I guess you can run some statistics on all this, but subjectively, to me, Italian felt much easier to learn because much if it - including the grammar - felt more familiar than German.
So in one having access to an expansive enough vocabulary, one will often use fewer of the core words. Partially as a way to remove ambiguity in written English (which can be very difficult), partially to write a shorter sentence than would be the case using Germanic root words alone.
For the second phrase you quoted, I could have written 'the heart of the tongue', but that could be read to imply a different meaning.
https://effectivelanguagelearning.com/language-guide/languag...
It is just that our word list is now bigger, meanings have split, and we often use the newer words.
We can still say and ask the same things with the old words, but the extra vocabulary makes for richer discourse; and we're now more used to those choices.
In a situation where brevity and clarity is necessary (e.g. dangerous environments, modern warfare), the language quickly strips itself to its core - without having to think about it. Even "mind the gap".
Also we are in an age in which native english speakers are a minority, so what is good english will inevitably change.
But by raw number of languages standardising on English is probably not ideal. Probably some hybrid of Chinese grammar, Korean alphabet and Latin pronunciations would have been my pick for example.
Orthography becomes irrelevant as soon as you use Hangul to write a language entirely different from Korean, which wouldn't have the same inflected forms.
You could hope for merging of communities that create an unified language, but whenever two communities are not completely merged, each will coin new words, the pronunciation will drift, etc.
That is because locutors create languages, not ruling bodies.
Examples of that include canadian french, and english as spoken in Europe, for which many words are not known to native english speakers.
Have some examples of these english words that native english speakers wouldn't know?
Even more of them can be found in business language, which did not become loan words.
Only occasionally is it used in a sense when a magnifying effect is implied.
You get a ruling body to declare a particular manner of speaking as the preferred one, mandate that it be taught to children in school and prevent anyone who speaks differently from appearing in mass media. After a generation, you have children who grew up speaking non-standard with their parents but standard with their peers in school. Many of them will speak standard with their children, so non-standard becomes something you use to speak to your grandparents. Then the grandparents die and almost everyone who speaks non-standard fluently doesn't use it regularly, so they forget. The next generation grows up barely aware that the standard way to speak is not the only way.
All of that doesn't completely stop natural language change from occurring, but it strongly constrains the range of possible variation. Locutors may create languages, but ruling bodies can tell them which language to create.
Because, being french, we actively do it, and it is an utter failure. People do not know the ruleset they were supposedly taught, new words largely come from the society as opposed to the institution, and thus the institution mostly acknowledges things after the fact.
From that pov, the thing you describe looks like a pipe dream.
Still, the descendants of emigrants who learnt the dialect of their parents can only understand the older generation, not their peers.
In a liberal democracy?
The Académie Française is responsible for defining the proper spelling of words and update the intricate grammar rules.
At some point the Éducation Nationale adopts the changes and requires that all children learn using the new rules.
Eventually style guides of major newspapers and TVs are updated as well.
This has worked mostly until the reform of the 1990s which is controversial. I think the Éducation has only recently started to enforce it (15 years later). Many publications still use or tolerate the old style. Microsoft office gives you two dictionaries to chose from.
So basically this has worked until people started to actively go against it...
And the language is explicitly standardized by the Accademia della Crusca.
Still you are not wrong, now that it is widely spoken, it is likely that the language will mutate quickly (and signs are already visible).
Look at words like day, tag, dag and so on in the various Germanic languages. When you see that in English, the letter g morphed into y in a lot of words, it makes sense and of course we have to allow for some rather random spelling in the past and a great vowel shift or two. I live in Yeovil which was recorded as gifle (a fork in a river) in about 900. The nearby river Yeo seems to be named after the town which is named for its location on a feature of the river ...
These islands from 55 BC to 1066 AD became a revolving door to various invasions, some of which included Swedes and Danes generally as vikings, Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Italians (Romans) and any other tom, dick or harry that could find a boat and fancied duffing up a few Britons and settling down and raise a few apples and chickens! When the Northmen - Norsemen - Normans ie Duke William of Normandy turned up in 1066 they eventually did the job properly and ... eventually became English themselves and simply gave the language a bit of a twist. For example we have both Saxon and Frankish (French) words for many things eg meat: cow and beef, sheep and mutton, chicken and errr chicken, pig and pork.
I think that because English has had so many influences in the past that it has developed a certain flexibility that many languages do not. It is also a relatively new language - only 1500 years old! I learned Latin at school for several years, along with French and lived in Germany for 10 years (off and on). English can be warped and twisted and generally abused and yet the meaning remains intact better than some other languages.
The ultimate irony here is that I am talking about the new kid language on the block on HN!
Yes, it definitely has. Ireland has (optimistically) ~1-2% native Irish speakers.
Welsh is spoken by maybe 20-30% of people living in Wales. I couldn't find a number for native/fluent speakers, but it is certainly much less than that figure - probably similar to the Irish one.
Scottish isn't even a language. There are languages called 'Scots' and 'Gaelic'. Again, both a spoken by a small minority.
http://sankrant.org/2011/03/the-english-class-system-2/
India, due to its deeply colonial state apparatus, is well on its way to losing most of its languages in the coming century. I think this is also the case with African nations - which might explain why the sub-continent (not just India) and Africa share so much in terms of human development indicators.
Oh, come on: you’re saying that teaching English to Indian students makes them illiterate in both their regional dialect and in English? You’re going to need to cite something like that, and a link that tries to correlate “poor countries often speak European languages” to “they’re poor because they’re not speaking whatever they originally used to” (instead of “their language is probably a byproduct of being colonized, and they’re poor because of that and not because European languages have some inherent linguistic deficiency”). And if we’re talking about anecdotal evidence, I suggest you take a look at the graduates of top “English-medium” institutions of India: many of them are multilingual.
I wonder, though, whether the conclusion from the data is correct. It could be that more people are getting access to the internet, so even people who didn't have a reason to learn English half a decade ago are now looking for courses online.
So I guess we don't make the grade :-(
As polyglot speaker, I am really thankfully to have been brought up learning multiple languages.
English only got relevant during the last century, and as human history is full of different kinds of lingua francas throuhout the milenias, others will follow.
From an outsider perspective, the time it took for British media and the political class to take note of the European sentiment on the issue of brexit was around 1 year. It was as if they just found out there was an non-English web out there..
Maybe the US has a higher number, but a lot of those are due to family, not to education.
We already have many localised Englishes across the world, American, Australian, Indian, various pidgin English, but also in politics, business, social media there are "New Speak" version of English in those contexts.
One of these will evolve to be the lingua franca of the young connected people and dominate. And then be superseded by the next evolved language.
Once we colonize Mars and elsewhere there will be some interesting forks in languages I am sure.
English is studied in primary school, which wasn't the case 20 years ago, let alone 50, so young people all have at least a minimal level whereas most people that are now passing away don't speak any English at all. This alone should be an important factor pushing average proficiency up. The coming of Netflix, HBO and their ilk in the last few years have made viewing TV series in English much more common (regular TV typically only offers dubbed versions). I teach at a university in English, ten years ago we didn't even offer that possibility and now demand is steadily increasing.
OK, I don't have actual data, they do... but given the limitations of their data (acknowledged in the piece itself), I'm taking it with a huge grain of salt.
20 years ago not many in Spain and France ( or even Germany ) would speak any English. May be they do, but may be they were too afraid, or refuse to speak as in the case of French.
20 years later literally everybody in ( Western ) Europe speaks English. I could go on the street and ask for directions, in places that are not cities or tourist attraction. Even the French. They may not be proficient at it, but they do understand and can do basic communication.
So I dont see any decline. And Thinking back I am surprised at how fast the world has evolved! ( Which also means I am getting old .... )
- Advanced English School?
- If if, between between.
I think that's the key difference between countries: some are compelled to be proficient in English because it is a necessity in order to get a descent life. Some sees it as just a need to compete.
I really understand. It might be also difficult for a great civilization like the Italian one to admit that they need to adapt to other civilization, speak English, adopt this language in order to express their ideas ...
The point probably is that those people don't need English in their life so they never invest in learning it.
That's tricky. Years ago primary extended from 1st to 8th grades (6 to 14 y.o. aprox.) so English, that started in 6th was primary. Now 6th to 8th have been moved to ESO.
Anyway I just checked with my son and he started in Infantil, so it's really soon.
The real issue is qualification. To really understand and speak English you need to learn pronuntiation properly. And that's the weakest link in our system. Most teachers have no idea how English is really pronounced and wouldn't be able to understand a native speaker to save their lives. It's impossible to learn English from someone that can't understand or speak it.
I believe it was Aguirre that proposed a plan to invite thousands of native speakers to teach English in Madrid. Of course everybody attacked her as usual whatever she says... I don't like her either, but that was a good idea for once.
I guess the take away is that teaching a whole country a new language takes time and is hard to accelerate.
At least it was according to the constitution but that doesn't mean much. Often laws that modified the 1871 and 1918 constitutions did not change its text but overrode its meaning. Imagine the US constitution but longer you get to hunt down the amendments yourself.
That's why I consider native teachers to be the most powerful advantage. At school they insist too much in grammar, that's important, but the foundation is how the language sounds.
I hate movies with original language and subtitles. I've used them with subtitles also in English with great results to learn.
But nothing can replace a teacher that corrects your pronuntiation as you speak and repeats the right sounds as many times as you need.
Also when I'm watching a movie for pleasure, I like to watch and listen, not to read.
Now I'm really confused. Or is it that bureaucratic Spain works short hours and other workers do long hours?
Bureaucracy is actually the single thing I hate most about Spain. I'm a professor at a university and the sheer amount of bureaucracy is staggering, asphyxiating at times. In fact it's a relevant factor making me work longer than I should as too much time is spent dealing with that. In industry most people don't have to deal with much bureaucracy, though, unless they're company owners or self-employed.
In industry, people tend to work long hours: there is still a culture of presentialism with remote work being frowned upon in many companies, suboptimal traditional work timetables with a long lunch break make many people return home way too late, and the threat of unemployment (not so much in the tech sector) and the need for money in an economy with modest salaries and high housing prices makes workers accept lots of (paid or sometimes unpaid) overtime.
If you're seriously considering moving, maybe it's a matter of being selective (supposing you can search while holding your current job) and taking time to find a company with more modern ways, that doesn't value presentialism and overtime. There is a growing minority of companies like that. If you mention these things as priorities in interviews, companies that want workers in their posts until late in the evening will probably filter themselves out.
If you do score a good company that allows for work-life balance and provides a good salary for Spanish standards (even if it's low for American standards), quality of life in Spain is excellent. Good climate in most places, good public healthcare, amazing and relatively cheap food both in supermarkets and restaurants, good bars and nightlife, nice natural landscapes and hiking places (especially in the north), decent public transport (not stellar compared to e.g. Germany but much better than in America) and in most cities you can go outside at 3 am and feel safe walking in 90% of the city (100% in some). I have had offers to work in America for several times my salary here and haven't even considered them.
From this one man's experience, it is not that Spain has regressed in its proficiency with English, but I find that other southern European countries (particularly Portugal) has upped the ante - a LOT.
To compare Paris (I understand it does not represent all of France, but it is one view point), 20 years ago I would have difficult time in ordering in a restaurant. A hardship many English-speaking visitors today will find hard to empathize with. In most places in Paris today I can get by with English and get complex transactions done.
Portugal has truly baked-in English proficiency into their national psyche now. Zealotry aside, this enables Portugal to further their economic and cultural interests more, I think.
> it is not that Spain has regressed in its proficiency with English
I'm not sure your multi-day vacations give you enough insight to debunk the study in TFA which says it indeed has regressed.
First times I went to France (90's), there were people I met who genuinely did not understand English at all - even simple words -, and I had shopkeepers who, when my stumbling French was also insufficient, pulled strangers off the street to translate, and at least in smaller towns it sometimes took multiple tries to find someone.
By my last few trips it'd become hard to practice my French because people switch to English the moment I stumble in French...
- of course Europe's largest economies are going to be the least incentivized to adopt English due to their larger internal market both in terms of culture as well as economics.
- The International Englishes (plural) are different from both UK and US English. The scientific community has its own 'dialect', and the EU political/administration/diplomatic English is different still. Standard tests based on US/UK spelling/grammar/vocabulary might not capture these nuances.
Standardized tests don't do well at assessing language fluency in general. For one example, my sister was born in the US, grew up in the US, was educated in English, spoke English (exclusively) at home, and graduated from the University of Pennsylvania. She failed the State Department's test of fluency in English.
I found Spanish much easier to learn than German because the grammar is simpler and the words are often similar to Latin words which are in turn similar to English words.
I never had to use Flash Cards when learning Spanish, they were vital for German.
For example, Mano is similar to Manual which is related to the Hand, obviously in German it is simpler as the word is the same.
However, negocio is similar to negotiate which reminds me of business... Betrieb on the other hand - probably going to need the flash cards.
Incidentally it also explains why native english speakers tend to have no idea about other languages.
The rise of youtube talking heads should also help... i'm pretty sure my daughter got most of her english from there.
Grammar and concepts are comparable. It's no Chinese for sure. Much less alien than Korean too.
(And let's not try comparing it with Hebrew, Indic languages or Arabic vs Latin group.)
Personally, I don't think grammar is a large hurdle to learning to understand a new language. You can learn once that Japanese usually has the verb at the end of the sentence, and afterwards use a dictionary whenever you don't understand the word at the end of a sentence to learn a new verb. But using a dictionary is already a step up from passive consumption. Most people just want to enjoy the show, so they're not learning much.
Knowing grammar helps. I'm Italian and Spanish and French have such similar grammars that learning to read them was mostly a matter of building a vocabulary. Listening to French is more complicate as its hard to find spaces between words. Talking is both simple (similar sounds except a few ones) and complex (subtle differences in how to build sentences.) Writing is the most difficult skill. Everything has to be almost perfect.
English wasn't only a matter of vocabulary. The differences in grammar are large enough that building and understanding a sentence requires to think in a really different way. I got a shot at German a couple of times. The differences are an order of magnitude larger and I never had the time to go beyond the basics.
This sounds wrong to me…
(Though i think the correct pseudo translation would be “In English also verb can end go”. Subtle difference, but more like German - und auf den Punkt.)
I can remember when we watched television in class there would be no subtitles. The teacher would pause the video every 2 minutes or so and then ask someone in the class to explain what had just happened during those 2 minutes.
Usually it would be stuff like a news broadcast or similar the teacher had taped from Japanese tv broadcast.
You could mostly translate things because they were talking about relatively mundane concepts which were similar to what we had been learning. "That clip was about the opening of a railway station in this prefecture etc."
I can remember one lesson the teacher played Mononoke Hime in class, this was a pretty big anime movie which had just come out at the time it was full of references to Japanese mythology and folklore, no one is class had any idea what was going on in the story because it was full of language we'd never heard before.
The other thing is that anime tends to use a lot of informal language, which differed a lot to the more formal speech we learnt in class. So I suspect it would be very difficult to learn Japanese from Anime alone.
I live in a small town near the serbian-hungarian border and we can watch both Hungarian and Serbian TV stations. In Serbia movies are subtitled (so you can hear English language all the time) while in Hungary movies are dubbed (so you can't hear anything other than hungarian language on TV). Serbian families who live here watch mostly serbian TV and hungarian families watch mostly hungarian TV stations. Ask any English teacher here and they will all tell you that there is very clear distinction between level of knowledge in serbian vs hungarian kids. They all live in the same town, go to the same school, the only difference is that those kids who watched serbian TV stations had much bigger exposure to english language as opposed to those who watched hungarian TV stations.
I'm Dutch and have a close friend who's Hungarian. His English is as good as mine. The only impression I got is that he needed to actively seek out opportunities to speak English whereas in The Netherlands you're bombarded with opportunities.
I do think it helps a bit though, but it's easily trumped by opportunity itself.
A few years later in high school when visiting a school in Germany, I was shocked to find out that the kids there were watching Discovery Channel completely dubbed in German.
That is how I learned the basics of the english language when I was a kid. Here in Portugal movies are subtitled.
Incidentally, I went to Milan once to participate in this thing, and neither Italians, Spanish, French, Polish and Russian people could understand each other. I speak a little bit of everything (almost, had to use pseudo-english with the polish and russian) so I had to do the translations. Talk abou information assimetry: I knew everything that happened because I was the unnoficial translator.
The "best" part of that trip was to have to watch Four weddings and a Funeral dubbed in Italian! It went some months before I was able to tolerate italian language again..
Instantly switching languages is hard though. You end up with sentences that make absolutely no cheesecake and fail you grammar basic if you switch to your native tongue again. Often happens to me after work when I was consuming content in English for a longer period of time.
Nearly everything is localized here though and it is very true that dubbed content suddenly feels very artificial. Older generations have a comparably bad English proficiency, even if they once excelled in school.
You don't say... when I'm in a situation where I have to speak two different languages to different people at the same time I sometimes end up using the wrong language with the wrong person. Really funny in retrospect but it greatly confuses everyone.
My favorite mistake (made by yours truly):
"I feel upset."
"Oh, I also feel angry."
"I said that I feel upset..."
"Yea, angry, me too"
"It's not the same."
"Wait, what? How isn't it?"
Emotional conversations with a native English speaker are harder because of this. I learned to get a bit better at it as my SO speaks Dutch as well.
Having the same conversation in Dutch with the same words and sentences yielded very different discussions. IMO, the research that people talk and think more rationally in a non-native language rings true.
A Swede will tell a joke. The swedish congregation and maybe some other Scandinavians will laugh. Then a moment later the English-speakers will laugh when it's translated into Englisg, then everyone else gradually, depending on how long each other language's translation takes.
The country is split linguistically between Dutch speakers in the northern Flemish region, and French in the southern Walloon region.
The Flemish region's television stations and cinemas run mostly subtitled programs (really, anything outside of children's shows and content made in the region or in the Netherlands).
In the French-speaking areas, the media companies and cinemas buy their content from France, where the vast majority of it comes overdubbed.
As a result, the Flemish have a much stronger command of English than their French-speaking counterparts.
That said, the French-speaking Belgians, at least in my experience of living there for a long time, speak English much better than the French.
A lot of that has to do with how international the country is, where Brussels not only hosts many international institutions, but also a lot of companies have their EU HQs there. Many people need to speak English to get jobs with these firms, so it drives up the English competency among the local population.
Your theory definitely has some merit.
I've encountered many Flemish Belgians who openly admit they can understand English but cannot speak it well. A member of my close familiy who works in aviation occasionally rants about "having to do everything in English", a position that I cannot begin to understand. Whereas I've worked for a Flemish Belgian company that also had Walloon Belgian customers who communicated not stubbornly in French (as the stereotype would suggest) but in professional English.
I believe that the language learning is affected by the generations. There has been a disregard, acceptance and now (what I believe) a new disregard of foreign languages in Flanders. Though I do not have any numbers to back that up. That said the news recently reported an all-time low for Flemish Belgian students with regard to reading and sciences (https://www.vrt.be/vrtnws/en/2019/12/03/_dutch-is-the-key-to...). So there might be a correlation between the two subjects.
It would be very interesting to have data on this subject as Belgium indeed is a great place to study this phenomenon.
The Spanish market is huge and so are other big influential countries like Japan, Germany or France which is still spoken in many other countries, mainly in Africa. So there is less incentive to learn English because everything is available in the local language.
There are other factors like closeness of the language to English(north European countries) and colonialism(the sub continent). The advancement of the Latin American economies makes Spanish a much more viable and influential competition to English so English becomes less necessary. You can even see it in popular culture where Spanish music and tv shows become popular all over the world. As a non Spanish speaker my random vocabulary in this language increased a lot during the last couple of years.
I've learned traveling in foreign countries that simply learning the native words for please, thank you, hello, goodbye, yes and no goes a long way towards having a pleasant experience. The locals will go out of their way to be nice to you for making the effort.
It's also the reason why there's a moderate correlation (didn't actually research this) between small EU countries and English ability. Small countries are better, because they don't have the resources to dub their series.
This used to be more true than now. The Netherlands has been regressing a bit in their English speaking ability precisely because children tv shows aren't in English anymore (though there's still plenty of opportunity in NL, there simply used to be more).
The more America appears to be ruled by bufoons and rednecks, the smaller the target on its back will get.
When the British empire mattered, English adoption was driven by England. In the 20th century, English was adopted because of the cold war, NATO, and business with American companies.
The rules for language prevalence will change, and soon, technology itself will become the arbiter of communication. Those that travel might learn to become multilingual, but many times, technology adoption precludes and obviates even travel.
Wow, I remember the English First billboards in Shanghai around 2009-2010. They showed a white guy and a Chinese woman raising their hands together, and their arms were shackled together at the wrist with a really heavy rope.
This must have worked for the Chinese target audience, but I found it hilarious.
> There are some concerns, as Quartz’s Nikhil Sonnad noted about last year’s report, about how representative the data it collects and analyzes is of the general population of each country. “The proficiency scores are based on free online tests, so the people taking them are self-selected,” he wrote, “They are not a representative sample of the country’s citizens, and may instead represent a group that is particularly interested in English and has access to the internet.” Even so, Sonnad says “it is the best dataset available for measuring English ability across countries.”
This is a weird concern to raise -- the idea that EF's data isn't representative because it's pulled from a sample of citizens extraordinarily interested in English would strongly imply that the true proficiency level in every country is much lower than reported, and to a lesser extent that the gaps between countries are probably wider than reported.
> correlation doesn’t necessarily prove causation. Is it, as EF and others argue, that better English skills facilitate global trade and investment, which leads to growth and new jobs? Or is it that rich countries can invest more in bilingual education?
Surely these are both true.
No, if your samples aren't representative then any conclusion you draw can be flawed for thousands of different reasons and in all possible directions. Two examples.
1) Let's say that the top 1% of English speakers of countries A and B took the test. You say "the gaps then would be wider than reported". Wrong, even if in this 1% sample country A scores the highest, it might very well have lower overall proficiency. If proficiency is normally distributed, but has a much greater variance in country A than country B, the maximum of A will be higher than of B, even with a lower average.
2) Now you take the tests at time t and t+1. However, at time t the test was less popular, so only 0.5% of the top speakers took the test, while at t+1 1% of the top speakers took the test. You would conclude that a lower score a time t+1 implies that the skill got worse, while it might have very well improved by a lot.
(In fact, I'm pretty sure that's what happened. I never heard of EF before 2017, so I couldn't have taken the test before then)
I agree with this in full. I don't see what it's responding to in my comment, though.
> 1) Let's say that the top 1% of English speakers of countries A and B took the test. You say "the gaps then would be wider than reported". Wrong, even if in this 1% sample country A scores the highest, it might very well have lower overall proficiency. If proficiency is normally distributed, but has a much greater variance in country A than country B, the maximum of A will be higher than of B, even with a lower average.
I'm not following you here. I claimed that when the test pool for each country is strongly self-selected for interest in English, the gap between the countries' average proficiency levels (in reality) is very likely to be larger than the gap between those countries' average test scores. The test scores are suffering from restriction of range.
An example in which country A has higher test scores than B at the same time it has lower proficiency looks like an example of that phenomenon, not a counterexample.
If A and B have the same mean proficiency and different variance, and selection into the test pool is driven only by proficiency, then the country with higher variance will test better under this system while having the same mean proficiency, that's true.
Europe has many languages and most European countries trade most with their neighbours. IMHO it makes sense to learn the language of a neighbouring country before trying "fit the American mold" (and I say that from the UK).
Language isn't merely vocabulary, grammar and pronounciation. It's also nuance in expression, proverbs, slang, idioms. All of this is lost when content is translated and dubbed. When a person in a US sitcom uses an idiom, the spanish dubbed content translates to a similar Spanish idiom. With subtitles not only do I get the pronounciation and vocabulary, I also see in the subtitles a best-effort mapping from the english idiom to the corresponding idiom in my native language.
I think this is solving itself automatically as movies and traditional TV gives way for youtube and netflix where dubbed content isn't as common.
French has a lot of words which are close or exactly the same as English, but doesn't sound the same or mean completely different things, which doesn't help. (example: 'argument' in English as in 'having an argument' and 'argument' in French as in 'ton argument ne mène nulle part' don't mean the same at all, other words can mean the same such as 'agile' but sounds like two different words when pronounced in French vs English)
And then you have pride (the wrong kind) coupled with the fear of sounding ridiculous, which is why 99% of French you hear speaking English has a very strong accent, they're not trying.
Whereas in Finland, subtitles on foreign TV programs are common and classes have less students (I think).
Thus I believe it entirely comes down to the government not being smart enough.
Then for foreign language (French and German) classes in state schools in England around 1975 onwards:
We'd often have around 30 pupils. Time was spend on learning vocabulary and set phrases, but mainly in the written form. This would be from around age 10 (French) or 13 (German). It was the first exposure to grammar concepts (verb, noun, etc). Little time was spent on speaking the languages.
At the end of this most of us we still incapable to speaking the foreign language, let alone being literate in them!
I'm not sure to what extent it has improved since.
I agree that language teaching is terrible here though. The period you describe was particularly bad. The teaching of formal English grammar had become unfashionable but foreign languages continued to be taught using grammar concepts that nobody now understood in English. It was completely absurd.
Much easier to catch these on iPlayer than freeview.
I hate it when I hear the stereotype "French people do speak English but they're not going to because they are so proud" (maybe not exactly what you're saying...). It's simply untrue. People who speak good English will very happy to practice whenever the opportunity shows up.
It's not easy to learn a foreign language, and most French people who didn't have the opportunity to study abroad, or who don't need English at their workplace don't speak English very well. However, I think most of them speak some English, as long as you're patient and don't expect them to be fluent. For many people, it's intimidating to speak English, even if they've learnt the basics at school.
> they have their own French speaking view of the planet
Indeed, they live in a country where they can get by using their own national language and most of them don't have enough opportunities to meet English speaking foreigners. Why should you expect them to learn your language, especially if you're the one moving there?
> Germany where English are much more/better spoken
English is hard for roman languages speakers. It seeems Italian, Spaniards, French have a harder time than Germans or Dutch...
The mega cultures with their larger populations are able to live within their own bubbles more easily than smaller countries. They typically produce a lot more media content to fulfill their own demand, as one example. It's true whether we're talking the US, Britain, Germany, France, Spain, Russia, China, Japan and so on.
Americans also live in their own universe. And so do many others...
- The language barrier creates a distinct market for products and services -> good for local companies.
- The language barrier creates a distinct market for media and entertainment -> good for local culture.
- Can't read US media directly -> slightly more political independence.
- People can't speak English -> slightly less brain drain (alas, most educated people learn English anyway, but not all).
No, they simply are not [2]
France has INCREASED as per the report, Spain has dropped.
"English proficiency levels are rising in the European Union, with more EU countries than ever in the Very High Proficiency band. France’s scores have improved for the past two years"
[0] https://www.ef.com/wwen/epi/
[1] https://www.ef.com/epi/regions/europe/
[2] https://www.ef.com/__/~/media/centralefcom/epi/downloads/ful...