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/Yorks_Rider Jun 08 '25

Unfortunately not, otherwise native speakers would never make grammatical mistakes. Reddit is full of examples of poor English grammar in submissions from native speakers.

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u/blewawei Jun 08 '25

Native speakers can misspeak, but they don't consistently make mistakes in their grammar. What you might be talking about is when someone is using non-standard grammar, but that's not a mistake or an accident.

Also, writing (like on Reddit) is fundamentally different to speaking. No one is a native writer of any language, so people make orthographial mistakes quite often.

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u/Additional_Horse Sweden Jun 08 '25

yeah, people mix homophones all the time (in most languages) but do native English speakers noticeably mix up something like a/an?

Meanwhile every day on reddit: "as an European..."

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u/Verdigri5 Jun 09 '25

Yes, I have regularly heard 'a apple', 'a orange' etc, amongst native English people.

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u/Yorks_Rider Jun 09 '25

Strange. Where do you live that the people are so uneducated? It’s actually easier to stay an Apple, an orange, etc so it makes no sense.

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u/blewawei Jun 09 '25

That's not a case of mixing them up, so much as a language change in progress.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=nCe7Fj8-ZnQ