Is Switzerland getting badder at English?
A global English proficiency ranking claims that Switzerland is increasingly losing ground. But pinning down a precise national language score is far from straightforward.
Originally from Ireland, Domhnall worked in research and writing in a couple of European countries before joining swissinfo.ch in 2017. He covers direct democracy and politics and is usually in Bern.
Last week Switzerland’s French-language public broadcaster, RTS, sounded the alarm: “the level of English among the Swiss is in free fall,” it wroteExternal link . “For the fourth year in a row, according to an international ranking, the Swiss standard has been slipping” – from 25th in 2021 to 30th (of 113) this year.
Whether a drop of five places amounts to a free fall is one thing. But in multilingual and highly globalised Switzerland, a decline could be seen as surprising. What’s going on?
The ranking cited by RTS was the 2023 “EF English Proficiency IndexExternal link ” (EF EPI), published annually by the global private education company Education First (EF), headquartered in Zurich. Based on the results of some 2.2 million online English tests, the EF EPI tots up fluency scores for countries, cities and regions: from the Netherlands, Singapore and Austria at the top to Yemen, Tajikistan and the Democratic Republic of the Congo at the bottom.
