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Comment by nwellnhof | Hacker News Reader

It's interesting that after Brexit, only 1% of EU citizens are native English speakers. That's less than Bulgarian:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_the_European_Unio...

I think that's a little misleading though, since virtually all north western Europeans (Netherlands, Scandinavia, Switzerland, Germany, Belgium etc.) that I've met who are under 35 or so speak English at very close to a native level. You can't say that about Bulgarian.

Being half-dutch, I wouldn't say fluent. Have you actually been to those countries, are are you just going by travellers you met?

Even in Holland, which has an extremely good English education from 7 or 8 has plenty of people who are good, but not fluent, and for the older generations it's much, much lower level, broken sentences, much smaller vocabulary.

When I was in France last time, 3 years ago, still plenty who struggled after I'd exhausted my terrible French. I've also noticed the French tend to speak French in game voice chat where almost everyone else will be using English, apart from Italians and maybe Arabic or Turkish or something (I don't really recognise the language).

That seems a little incorrect, considering that Ireland is non-English only on paper.

Ireland is quite small compared to the current size of the EU.

Yep we are about 1 percent or just over I think.

But it has 2/3 the population of Bulgaria.

That's exactly the point. Ireland is only larger country in the EU with native English speakers.

Ireland has English as an official language, along with Irish.

Interestingly it's now quite similar in number to Catalan, which after all these years is still not an official EU language despite being spoken by ~10M people (~4M natively) in multiple countries.

All Spaniards can speak Spanish according to Spanish Constitution.

Thus, Catalan is a regional language. If the EU should have to provide translations and material in each of the regional languages, the cost of coding laws would be quite a bit high.

There's already 24 official languages:

https://europa.eu/european-union/about-eu/eu-languages_en

not even those get all translations:

https://europa.eu/european-union/abouteuropa/language-policy...

And cost per page is around 80€

https://slator.com/industry-news/eur-82-per-page-inside-eu-t...

Already 2006 translation cost was close to 1bn/year, must be much more now...

https://euobserver.com/news/21459

I'm genuinely shocked only 43% know English as an additional language. I guess it depends on what level of knowledge they're looking for.

Eastern Europe used to be under USSR influence, which made English language education a rarity. Russian and French were much more popular. The public signs often had French as foreign language, not English.

Older generations often know some French, Russian,German and even Spanish but rarely know any English. Minorities often speak the language of the country they live in, their mother tongue and 1 or 2 of the language listed above.

For younger generation it’s completely different of course, most speak the local language, the mother tongue and English + the language of the country they work if they are working abroad.

In Slovakia, I met a waitress of about 25 years old who only spoke Slovak, Hungarian and a third language that I also didn't speak, maybe it was Russian. In a night train from Poland to Germany, I met someone of about 30 who only spoke Polish and German. So it can still differ a lot per person. (I only speak several western European languages.)

You can have an entire life in and out of the internet with spanish, without need of English. I'm not saying it's the optimal choice, but only if you get technical you'll miss something.

And this is even when localized results separate sites for Spain and Latin america. There's a bit of cross-interaction, but not that much.

I guess this is possible with other languages to a varying degree.

I mean it seems totally plausible. Just based on my interactions in Europe (as a dumb non-multilingual English speaker), I'd just have guessed it'd be higher. I've never come across anyone who's had ZERO English skills, while that was somewhat common in Tokyo, for example. Granted, almost all of my time in Europe has been spent in cities so that probably matters a lot.

I'd guess the average English proficiency also varies a lot by the country.

I've had lots of elderly relatives who were born before WWII (so in their 80's or 90's) who have or had, to my knowledge, almost absolutely zero English skills. They might have known "yes" or "no", but that's probably it. You wouldn't have been able to ask them a question and get an answer. Most of them aren't alive any more, of course, and I think most of the ones who are slightly younger than that (those born close to WWII to baby boomers) actually do have at least some knowledge of English. Some are probably fairly close to zero, though, and I wouldn't count most of them as knowing English as a second language.

Elderly people living in smaller cities or towns or even in the countryside aren't who you'd be likely to meet as a visitor, of course. But as citizens they exist.

You'd probably be hard pressed to find a young person who can't manage to speak any English here, though. I guess that might be more likely in a country like Spain where the local language is globally large enough that you can get by in working life without knowing any English.

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