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Huh, it really is a universal language after all.
Suprised with Canada tbh.
I’d assumed nearly all Québecois can speak English.
I mean Montréal is basically half english native langauge speakers at this point.
It's expected that people will get confused with Canada.
It's Zimbabwe in Africa:
While the majority of Zimbabweans speak Shona (75%) and Ndebele (18%) as a first language, standard English is the primary language used in education, government, commerce and media in Zimbabwe, giving it an important role in society. About 90 percent of the population can speak English fluently or at a high level, and it is the native language of White Zimbabweans
Zimbabweans speak fluent english, most Zimbabweans I have worked with are really, like really well educated and I feel so dumb having this Afrikaans accent around their British English
Indians not mentioned?
Given they are the largest group of English speakers and English has this "usage dictates form" rule that allows vapid influencers to be thankfully overwhelmed by people in India dictating the course of English by their very participation and number, India defines what English is and thus cannot be less than 90% usage.
What's more likely, since they dictate what is English, now, by "usage dictates form", the rest of us are no longer fluent English speakers unless and until we can correct our use of words like revert, below, willn't, and of course confirm the right head posture.
Now kindly revert to same.
Please do the needful.
What about Canada?
Only 86%:
According to the 2021 census, English and French are the mother tongues of 56.6% and 20.2% of Canadians respectively. In total, 86.2% of Canadians have a working knowledge of English, while 29.8% have a working knowledge of French.
A lot of the remainder speak at least passable English too but answer no out of spite.
How very French of them..
This is part of the reason that, if I decide to leave the UK, I'll probably move to the Netherlands.
Fair warning: people still talk Dutch at the coffee machine at work. You will still miss out on a lot of social communication. But when you decide to go and learn Dutch, it gets really hard to get practise in, since everyone switches to English if you start talking to them. Even if you started talking Dutch, your accent will give away that you are more fluent in English, and people will just switch.
This map makes me wonder if Icelandic/Norwegian are in any danger considering how much of their population speak English(Which has much more content and speakers)
Sort of with Icelandic. There's a very noticeable decline in Icelandic vocabulary among high school students.
Wait, this is amazing! A real Icelander actually replied!
There's not a lot of us on Lemmy unfortunately. I'd be surprised if we even reached triple digits.
In fairness your capital city hardly even reaches triple digits
Whoa, which one? Is it Hatari?
people still speak the native language most of the time, sweden isn't that far behind on amount of people who can speak english (mostly just old people lowering the percentage), and i'm almost certain what's going to happen is just that our languages incorporate a shitload of english loan words and phrases, like a lite version of taglish in the phillipines
Sweden is one of the non-obvious countries (that being places that aren't like... UK, USA, Australia, etc) that I would have expected to be on this map. So that makes sense that that they're close, just not 90% or higher.
Although I've never been to Sweden, so admittedly my assumption wasn't based on anything.
honestly it still feels a bit wrong that we don't reach 90%, even my grandma could understand and probably stammer out the odd sentence if she had to, and everyone is exposed to english all the time.
I could imagine immigrant communities being a factor as well. I think there's a wide range of English proficiency among people who are born abroad (at least that's my impression from speaking to people studying Swedish). Given that we have a bit more immigration than Norway, that could definitely be a deciding factor.
(Maybe I'm just grasping at straws. Don't wanna be losing to Norway, right?)
I'm surprised Philippines isn't regarded as over 90% in Asia they are second only to Singapore which indeed has a blue dot.
I think it depends on how strict a definition you put on it. According to pna.gov.ph less than 9% of adults dont use English at all. And I guess this doesn't include taglish, because I dont think they mean mixing the word shorts into the language is using English
So I guess its a matter of definition, if you can afford to go to school nearly everyone can speak English, if you can't go to school English proficiency drops but over 90% at least use English sometimes. As from 4th grade they primarily use English to teach in school for most subjects
At least in Norway and Iceland (yes nearly other European countries as well) translate Disney movies to their local language. The Philippines doesn't, they serve English as English is one of the two official languages and has been since it was US territory.
I was surprised when sitting in the back of the class of first grade in Norway that most kids wasn't able to use English conversationally (yet), but that is just my ignorance, and rather I should be surprised to see most kids knew basic words in English instead. But its hard to have perspective when my multilingual daughter had conversational English from 2 years
not really, it has use because you can speak with the Swedes and theres a case of patriotism too
Is the USA one country?
Yes. For now.
And do 90% really speak English? Might be a bit of a stretch.
WE SPEAK AMERICAN GOTDANG IT
What else would it be?
this post was submitted on 12 Jun 2025
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