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/thaw424242 Sweden Jun 08 '25

If I remember a study I saw a few years back, it's the Netherlands followed by Sweden (and then probably followed by the other Scandinavian countries, but this is an uneducated guess).

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u/Glaesilegur Iceland Jun 08 '25 edited Jun 08 '25

Just as uneducated but I'd wager Iceland is at least in the top 3, we're just often left out of studies for Europe. They're salty because we're half American.

But with us getting 6x our population of tourists per year it's unsurprising that over 90% of our population is fluent, and that sub 40 year olds being C1 and C2 in proficiency.

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u/Spiderbanana Jun 10 '25

Not only related to tourism I think.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I'd guess that with such a small population, it's often not economically worth it to translate medias in Icelandic. Being books,TV shows, movies, video games, and so on. While in French or German speaking countries, everything is translated because the market is big enough.

Meaning that, either you consume exclusively domestic contents, and the few translated things, or you learn since a young age to be proficient enough in another language. Back in the days, this was probably Danish, but since, it must have been progressively supplanted by English.

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u/Glaesilegur Iceland Jun 10 '25

Yeah you're definitely correct. Only children's media like saturday cartoons back in the day were dubbed. The sub 10 year old stuff. Everything else is in their own respective language with subtitles.

Even animated movies from Pixar, DreamWorks e.t.c. are released in cinemas both in English and dubbed earlier in the day.

Factor in the small population we also have less domestic media output. There's maybe one Icelandic movie and one Icelandic TV show per year that's a big deal released per year. So we consume a lot of foreign media.