The single hardest thing about learning Swedish is that everyone speaks English perfectly in Sweden. At first, I was a bit unsure about going to a country where the spoken language is not very popular. According to Wikipedia, there are only 9.8 million native speakers (2018), roughly 0.12% of the world’s population. Shocking right? Nevertheless, I chose Sweden. And to my surprise, everyone speaks English in here.
English might not be the official language in Sweden, but almost everyone in Sweden excels at speaking it. In 2017 Sweden ranked 2nd out of 80 countries in the EF English Proficiency Index (EF EPI), which measures the language proficiency of non-native speaking countries. Since 2012, Sweden has managed to be in the top 3 every single year. But, how come Sweden managed to receive the “very-high” proficiency every single year for the past seven years? Well, this is my hypothesis.
Source: Magnus Liam Karlsson/imagebank.sweden.se
Internet penetration.
The majority of the websites on the internet are in English, that is just a fact, no need to quote anyone or give any numbers. It only makes sense that if people have higher access to the internet they’ll often be exposed to more content in English. At the same time, good English skills give user additional opportunities to access more English-language resources. In general, there is an obvious correlation between the level of English and the internet penetration. The easier the access, the better the proficiency.
Source: EF / https://www.ef.se/epi/
Culture diversity.
From my experience at school and the workplace, Sweden is a multicultural country. People come to Sweden to study or to work or just to hang out and they stay for longer than they expected to. The extensive amount of academic programs offered in English together with the good chunk of multinational companies makes English the common language among all the different nationalities. In simple words, you will find yourself speaking English more in Sweden than Swedish (this sounds so weird, but its true). Just to give you a quick example, in my master’s there are people of seven different nationalities (probably even more). At the brewery where I occasionally work, there are people from South Africa, Australia, New Zeland, Syria, France and of course Sweden.
Consumption of English media.
In Sweden, the audio-visual content is not dubbed. Movies, TV shows, series, and whatever media content you can think is showcased in its original language. We all know that the most popular TV series and shows are in English. It would be super weird to watch Family Guy or Game of Thrones in Swedish. I don’t
时间：2018-04-02