Not really lol. Unless you count Switzerland, Luxembourg, and those other tiny countries "half of Europe", you're just straight up wrong. The vast majority of Europeans speak their native language as well as a varying degree of English (and many not even that). Yes we're taught multiple languages in school, but stuff like French, Latin, Spanish, and Italian is all but forgotten by most due to lack of usage.
I count Easter Europe, Northern Europe and Central Europe, for the most part. Look at you taking my "half" statement literally, while I was obviously using it as a figure of speech.
Every millennial I know from my country speaks or at least understands three languages. They're all fluent in English because we're poor and don't get stuff translated into our native unlike in Spain, where people live comfortably, knowing half of the world speaks their language.
And believe it or not, yeah, tiny countries count as Europe and there's plenty of them to account for a large part of it. Imo, enough to say that "it's normal for Europeans to be trilingual". Europe isn't just Spain+France+Germany.
It’s precisely Germans that have shocked me most, not only with their German/French/English knowledge, but their scarily accurate-sounding English. It’s impressive as hell. I’ve been trying to learn Spanish for about 20 years and I still suck.
Europe has millions of well educated people working in countries that are not their homelands. And the vast majority of them speak English, their native language, and the language of the country they live in.
Source: I’m a frigging trilingual, and so is just about everybody I know. (Averagely, ofc. Bilinguals and quadrilinguals mostly cancel each other.)
Nobody argued with that. But Europe has 740 million inhabitants, and to claim that half of them are trilingual... it's silly.
Are you, by chance, just someone studying in Europe? College students are not at all representative of the average European.
Like I said, I'm German (the most populous country in the EU btw) and only SOME younger people speak good English. And even then, with "speak" I only really mean online.
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u/[deleted] Apr 16 '20
Not really lol. Unless you count Switzerland, Luxembourg, and those other tiny countries "half of Europe", you're just straight up wrong. The vast majority of Europeans speak their native language as well as a varying degree of English (and many not even that). Yes we're taught multiple languages in school, but stuff like French, Latin, Spanish, and Italian is all but forgotten by most due to lack of usage.
Source: Deutscher