Huge change in past 2 decades. Many French speak very good English nowadays. Same in Germany.

That's my experience. The French speak much better English than English people speak French. Which is embarrassing if you are English.

Yeah, one of the fascinating shifts is how big the shift has been, from “no-one in the hotels right by Gare du Nord speaks any English” to “everyone, including half the graffiti artists, do”. (And as a result my French has got considerably worse)

Same in Spain. My wife is totally fluent in Spanish, mine is pretty good - but even in small towns it's a hell of a job to get people to switch away from English.

Same in Italy. I desperately try to use my best (not altogether awful Italian) everywhere, and everyone, without exception (including street food-selling nonnas in Naples), replies in adequate to perfect English. Makes me feel like even more of a wally.

My friend’s Italian is good enough for him to have acquired citizenship but even so he gets replies in English sometimes.

Still not sure people enjoy speaking English in France in the way they're happy to in other countries. But obviously everyone learns it at school and many get it through work at multinationals (including creating fake Anglicisms like 'afterwork')

And of course the ‘relooking’.

As someone who spends a lot of time in French-speaking countries this is deeply annoying, in that when I was actually learning French as a 12-year-old everyone was like 'you're on your own kid' and now I'm 27 and speak good French but with an accent, people just want to practice their English on me

I'll always be very grateful that I didn't get sent to Paris on my year abroad. Working in rural Alsace for 7 months did wonders for my French.

Deeply weird dynamic in Amsterdam is 'the person behind the till speaks at least two European languages - neither of which is Dutch'. I think it is a shame because it is bad for the future of the language, but as Matt says I don't think there's really a lever available to fix it.

You can make yourself feel OK about it by wondering how many Huguenot refugees in NL learned Dutch back when Voltaire was living here (presume few of Charles II’s entourage in exile did either), but it still feels not so great.

suspect this is a temporary problem? my grandparents were french speakers in large french-speaking communities in massachusetts but all their kids are monolingual english-speakers. parents on one of my kid's soccer team in sweden use english as a lingua franca but the kids use exclusively swedish

Wait what’s this about large French-speaking communities in Massachusetts? Where/when?

around here; quebecois and acadian immigrants, same migration as kerouac's family. was dying out by the 1940s and 1950s. i had an uncle who went to a french-speaking public school in brockton in the 1940s, my dad grew up being scolded/cursed at in french by older relatives.

Wow! I didn’t know there were that many in MA.

Wonder what that French would have sounded like.

yeah its long gone now. i think the francophone population was far bigger in the factory towns west and north of the city like lowell

Yes, my experience is that language instruction in Britain is like that in America: the non-elite (and many of the elite) aren’t actually expected to learn how to speak during their years of mandatory instruction.

I was in Bruges at the weekend and the staff there had a friendly joking coversation in French, Dutch, German and English. Is pretty shocking when you really how bad British people are in comparison.

Where I live in the south of France the Brits live in an English bubble, they use English gardeners, pool boys, English craftsmen, they go to British pubs because they are too lazy to learn French. Pretty sad to live in a country and be so helpless because you cannot speak the language.

Many other Europeans speak better English than the English!

I have met some French people who have lived in England who speak better English than many English people. Often I think because they want to fit in they try to get every bit of grammar and detail perfect. Whereas many English people get lazy with their own language. Language can often be fluid.

Haha I agree. Here in France I have dealt with Northern Englishmen and Scotsmen that were hardly comprehensible.

regional English is bad? bring back Lord Reith?

If you want to be understood it’s better to speak proper English.

I teach English as a second language to mainly middle-aged european business people, nearly all spoken/listening. There are I believe about 180 million Europeans who have English but are non-native speakers. I don't find the concept of "proper English" helpful in the least

Whatever, but if you speak English with a fat Scottish accent, I’m afraid our conversation will be short.

one of their biggest problems is occasionally coming across native UK English speakers who "speak proper" and think that's enough, and it's not their problem that people don't understand them and are shy or afraid to reply in case they make a Grammer/vocabulary error

Actually Lord Reith spoke with a Scots accent. You can find clips on line. He just insisted BBC announcers used RP.

Maybe in Paris, for the rest of the country, forget it.

Yes. Both countries are absolutely fine for travelling with English now, which is a huge difference to the recent past. (As a side note, the French-speaking half of Belgium interestingly didn't progress in English at the same pace as France itself, not sure why. But the difference is noticeable.)

I think the English-speaking rate in Wallonia is also substantially lower than in Quebec, but outside EU institutions, I'd guess anglophone immigration to French-speaking Belgium is generally lower than in Quebec (and maybe with less focus on other languages e.g. German in Quebec schools than in 🇧🇪?)

That's just not true in Paris. In fact I'm trying to think of a sine tourist spot I've been to where you can't use English.

I’m living in France for over ten years. Even the French I spoke about it agree they speak crap English.

Don't know what to tell you. I've been to both France and the Netherlands in the past week and the standard of English in both was equally excellent.

I’m curious where you went and whom you spoke to.

Paris! we're comparing capital cities. English in Amsterdam was excellent. English in Paris was excellent.

This is my experience of Paris. Not so when I first went but that was a long time ago. But on bouldering trips to Fontainebleau I’ve still had to speak French, eg to old skool Bleausards who know every problem in the woods but no English.

It’s not even really true in Spain despite (or maybe because of) the Spanish left having a giant complex about not speaking English (Franco outright banned school foreign language lessons so over a certain age Spaniards don’t speak English, and libs there think it makes Spain backwards)

My experience is the Spanish speak excellent English, at least in Catalonia. I’m always surprised their French is so crap as they live right at the border of France and both languages are romance. 🤷🏽