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The European Union’s remarkable growth performance relative to the United States
(www.bruegel.org)
this post was submitted on 19 Jan 2024
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We will not get people who are past their 40s to learn a new language en-masse. Meanwhile many of the young generations are quite proficient with English.
In the business context in particular it is important that language is precise, so contracts can be negotiated. This often enough is an issue even if all parties are of the same native language. There exists a lot of legal interpretation for each language as to how specific terms are to be understood, as well as standard formulations and references for specific industries.
All of this established practice would have to be re-established with a constructed language. This process takes decades, if not centuries. In the current situation it seems much easier to teach proper English in school and encourage usage of English, so people are proficient in it.
Probably more in Germanic languages countries than Romance countries (don't know about Slavic). Proximity to the language and lack of dubbing helps. I come from a Romance language speaking country, half of my friends don't know how to properly speak English (let's say enough to be able to work in English)
I mostly know the situation in Germany, the Nordic countries, the Netherlands and some eastern European countries. When i recently visited Denmark i was positively shocked that people in their 40s and 50s overwhelmingly were fluent in English too. In the eastern European countries it is a strong generational divide. Young people tend to be very good english speakers while there are very few among the older generations. I guess that is the result of learning russian as second language in school and english only as third language and probably many people didn't learn english in school at all. Judging from my parents there isn't much of the russian left that they learned in school either.
Same experience as yours when I visited Norway a few years back, 50 year old people were at ease with English. I guess the Norwegian media only get you so far ha ha.
To contrast, in France, French-speaking Belgium, Italy, Spain, (I dont' know about French-speaking Switzerland), even young people would have issues speaking English. You can clearly see the divide here:
https://www.ef.com/assetscdn/WIBIwq6RdJvcD9bc8RMd/cefcom-epi-site/reports/2023/ef-epi-2023-english.pdf
Portugal is the exception, I don't know why.
Portuguese here. This is anecdotal evidence but, as far as I can tell, a lot of our proficiency comes, essentially, to constant exposure to the English language since the early to mid-90s. We don't dub English-speaking media (apart from movies and tv shows more aimed at kids, but even then, Cartoon Network didn't even have subs when I was a kid and I still watched it religiously), the video games we played when we were kids also didn't have a Portuguese language option so we were basically forced to learn English.
And now that the Internet has become widespread throughout the country, the younger generation consume a lot of English-speaking content, so they have little trouble with speaking and writing in it.
This results in a good % of the population having decent to good English, not just the kids but a lot of people in their 30s (and some in their 40s) too.
Maybe in Western Europe, but years of online gaming have taught me that Eastern Europeans have dreadful English skills. Your perspective is probably skewed, since we Germans are comparatively fluent.
It's even worse. Germany has still some generational divide here but high proficiency on average on a level comparable to countries without that generational gap. So in reality Germans are not comparably fluent, but very proficient... or not at all. Which skews perception even more.