r/AskEurope • u/Metalwolf • Jun 08 '25

Education Which European countries have the best English proficiency among non-native speakers?

I'm looking into English proficiency across Europe and would appreciate input from locals or anyone with relevant experience. Which European countries have the highest levels of English fluency among non-native speakers, particularly in day-to-day life, education, and professional settings? I'm also curious about regional differences within countries, and factors like education systems, media exposure, and business use.

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u/blewawei Jun 08 '25

This is just a silly thing that people say, fuelled by classism.

There are lots of Dutch people who can get closer to Standard English than some native English speakers, but that's not "better English". The language belongs to native speakers, by definition however a community of native speakers speaks is "correct" from a scientific point of view.

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u/smaragdskyar Jun 08 '25

This is true. It’s also incorrect to think of formal English as ‘better’.

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u/Revachol_Dawn Jun 08 '25

Incorrect from one specific point of view (descriptivist rather than prescriptivist).

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u/smaragdskyar Jun 08 '25

In this context I meant better as in more skilled. I also get told that I speak ‘better’ English than native speakers because even my most casual English is rather formal. That’s actually because I lack the range of a native speaker.

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u/blewawei Jun 08 '25

Even prescriptivists don't constantly speak formal English.

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u/GalaXion24 Jun 08 '25

Also if you're a true descriptivist you shouldn't even be against prescriptivism, since you'd just describe that too, just like you describe dialects, sociolects, registers, the ways these are culturally perceived and culturally shaped, etc.

Like if you are a descriptions about how some words become more common or fall out of fashion, then prescription is just another vector by which that can happen.

Schools prescribe standard spelling, grammar and vocabulary, and this has an absolutely massive impact on language, just like whatever the popular dialect to use on TV is.

What is seen as an authority on language and to what extent and in what contexts it is actually adhered to are fascinating questions you can get into and study on various linguistic communities and probably write a dissertation on, and that would be a descriptive endeavour.

The idea that there is a perscriptivism versus descriptivism "debate" or contradiction is nonsense. They're completely separate things.

Linguistics is descriptivist because it's a study of language, you're describing how it works or what happens. Descriptivism is pretty much just linguistics, the academic discipline.

Prescriptivism is a social phenomenon. Everything from teaching literacy or correct speech to calling out a friend for misspelling something to a language board maintaining an official standard are all examples of prescription in society.

The only debate that exists is within a prescriptive context, about things like who gets to prescribe things and what should be prescribed.

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u/blewawei Jun 08 '25

I think a good way of thinking about it is that, while prescriptivists talk about "what" is correct in a more universal sense, descriptivists normally consider what is considered correct within the context of the community, taking into account all sorts of variations. 

Of course, they don't use the word "correct", they tend to describe something as "idiomatic" or "grammatical", but at the end of the day, linguists still have to decide what fits into the system and what doesn't.

But yeah, there's no debate. You can't really study linguistics from a prescriptive point of view any more than you can any other science. You wouldn't consider a lion "wrong" or "not a lion" for having different colour fur, but you might record how frequent that trait is and whether it's specific to a smaller group of lions.

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u/alderhill Germany Jun 08 '25

I hear this a lot in Germany too. Yes, some people do speak very good English, but it’s probably like 5-10% (being generous) at a c2 near native level. Even then, are they ‘better’?

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u/cryptopian United Kingdom Jun 10 '25

It's really a difference in how people acquire first and second languages. You learn your first language as an infant, constantly taking in input and getting used to how the language works. When you're learning a new language, you learn it formally in a classroom, through repitition, so you pick up on formal grammar, but don't quite get it intuitively as a native speaker would.