Archives for January 7th, 2005

Lose the Delusion recently linked to this odd story in The Independent about the English language in Europe. The basic thrust of the article: the British are "dunces" when it comes to foreign languages, with only "one in three Britons" able to speak a second language. The story also suggests that English isn’t as widely spoken in Europe as some people would like to believe.

To this end it mentions Slovenia, where "according to EU data" only 13% of the population speaks English. (Apparently, this is one of the worse rates in Europe. In Bulgaria, it’s 14% and in Turkey it’s 10%. In France, by contrast, it’s 32%.)

Of course, anyone who has spent any significant amount of time here knows that this figure is highly unlikely. In fact, it’s for the birds. Throughout my stay here, I’ve been consistently amazed at how many people speak English, and how well they speak it. In my experience, the only other countries that can compare are in Scandinavia and the Netherlands.

I tried to find some official figures to back this up, but in my pre-weekend laziness, I only turned up this. It mentions a 1991 census, which found that 34% of Slovenia’s population spoke English and that "the proportion has probably increased since then."

"Probably" is probably right. This graphic, recently published in The Economist, shows that a whopping 88% of Slovenian pupils were learning English by 2000 –one of the highest percentages in Eastern Europe.

In short, the 13% figure is either based on a bad sample, or they mixed up Slovenia with Slovakia again. Either way, it’s bobbins.