!
Maybe a late reaction but today a study was publish about English spoken by people for which English is not their own language. The Netherlands are on place 1 ! In the last 9 years, in the same study, the Netherlands were always represented in the top 3.
The other places were English is well spoken by the natives are
2 - Sweden ( last years number 1 )
3 - Norway
4 - Denmark
5 - Singapore
6 - South Africa
7 - Finland
8 - Austria
9 - Luxembourgh
10 - Germany
I'm however convinced that snowleopard discovered on the rest of his trip that most Dutch people do speak English quite well
As (ex) British colonies, do South Africa or Singapore really deserve any credit or a place on the list?!Maybe a late reaction but today a study was publish about English spoken by people for which English is not their own language. The Netherlands are on place 1 ! In the last 9 years, in the same study, the Netherlands were always represented in the top 3.
The other places were English is well spoken by the natives are
2 - Sweden ( last years number 1 )
3 - Norway
4 - Denmark
5 - Singapore
6 - South Africa
7 - Finland
8 - Austria
9 - Luxembourgh
10 - Germany
I'm however convinced that snowleopard discovered on the rest of his trip that most Dutch people do speak English quite well
I would have to agree that it is odd to include them in this list.
Poor show I would suggest!
I've been to South Africa a few times and in rural areas traveling with an Afrikaans speaker has come in handy more than once, so it isn't too surprising to me that South Africa isn't higher on the list. It's absolutely true though that menus, billboards, etc. are much more likely to be in English than in Afrikaans.
I wonder what criteria authors of that list used? In Singapore for instance 36% of the population use English as a first, or home, language and is in fact the most widely spoken first language. I doubt 36% of Netherlanders use English as their first language. I wonder if they considered India, where while there are only 250,000 people using it as their first language, over 129 million speak it, and it is the second most widely spoken language (out of 140 spoken in that country). Still only 10% of Indians speak English.
