Is Switzerland getting badder at English?

In multilingual Switzerland, English is one of various foreign (and national) languages vying for attention. © Keystone / Gaetan Bally

A global English proficiency ranking claims that Switzerland is increasingly losing ground. But pinning down a precise national language score is far from straightforward.

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.

Switzerland, with a score of 553, sits just behind Hong Kong and just ahead of Honduras – and right on the border between “high proficiency” and “moderate proficiency”. Young people in the country have notably fallen back in the past years, the report shows.

Limited sample

However, as a means of general international comparison, the ranking is questionable. What it gains through a huge dataset, it loses in representativeness: the scores are based on millions of answers to EF’s free online English test, where “only those who want to learn English or are curious about their English skills will participate”, the company writes.

This self-selection bias means a potential skewing of the results at both ends of the scale: in poorer parts of the world, “people without an internet connection would automatically be excluded”; in hyper-connected, highly qualified Switzerland, many fluent or native speakers – such as the SWI swissinfo.ch English-speaking editorial staff – would likely be excluded too.

Meanwhile the median age of respondents globally was 26, and almost 90% were under 35; but in Switzerland, well over half the population is older than 40.

Laurent Morel, the EF country manager for the French-speaking part of Switzerland, says that while the results “are not representative of the country at large”, they do give a good picture when it comes to those who want or need to boost their English.

The methodology of the report – which has been running for 13 editions – has remained constant, he says. This means the “organic” range of respondents taking the test should also be fairly stable over time, and the emerging trends valid.

He specifically mentions the drop in the scores of young people over the past years, which correlated neatly with the Covid-19 pandemic and school closures. He also points out the differences in results between German- and French-speaking parts of Switzerland, which tallies with many people’s impression that better English is found in, say, Basel than in Lausanne. It also makes sense given the higher standards of English in schools in German-speaking cantons, he says – whereas French-speaking schools try to push German alongside English.

Ultimately, Morel and EF believe the ranking has its merits: “there is no other dataset of comparable size and scope,” EF writes. “Despite its limitations, we, along with many policymakers, scholars and analysts, believe it to be a valuable reference point in the global conversation about English language education.”

‘Interesting, if not entirely scientific’

And despite the biases, the report does manage to gain attention, at least in the media. Writing about the 2018 results, the Economist magazine said it was “interesting, if not entirely scientific”; other illustrious references include the New York Times, while various Swiss media (including SWI swissinfo.ch) have reported on it in the past.

A much-commented storyExternal link in the SonntagsZeitung paper this summer used the ranking as a springboard to explore causes of the apparent decline of the nation’s English skills: for example, the competition from other languages spoken in the country, and the Swiss tendency to dub – rather than subtitle – English-language films (then again, the paper said, Austria does the same and it’s third in the ranking).

The RTS story from last week also engaged in speculation and asked some secondary school teachers about slipping standards – none of them reported having noticed any.

PISA ranking

Yet if the EF report is not scientifically bulletproof, alternative rankings are hard to come by, and evaluations are often either anecdotal or limited in range.

In a 2022 interviewExternal link, the head of the University of Zurich’s Language Centre said that English proficiency in Switzerland had “strongly improved” – that is, from what she had observed among third-level students visiting the centre’s courses.

Beat Schwendimann from the Swiss Teacher Federation meanwhile points to the OECD’s triannual PISA studyExternal link, in which Swiss pupils (the study is done with 15-year-olds) were classed 16th of 35 countries for English skills in 2018.

As for noting any long-term slippage, Schwendimann says he will wait for the results of the next PISA study, due out in December. PISA also plans to roll out a new foreign language assessment to get even more data about English proficiency around the world – albeit only in 2025, and again with data restricted to teenagers.

In the meantime, if there is a decline underway, Schwendimann speculates, it could indeed have something to do with Swiss multilingualism: whereas in other countries, English is the clear second language, Switzerland has four national languages, plus a diverse history of immigration – that’s a lot of competition. Another reason could be increasingly less exposure to English, he says: these days, internet sites and Netflix streams are all translatable to German, French or Italian with a single click.

The new lingua franca

Spoken well or less well, English is widespread in Switzerland. It has replaced French as the second-most spoken language behind German in workplaces, and these days it’s not unusual to hear German- and French-speaking Swiss chatting in English – and sparking debates about national identity, cohesion and education policy.

In March this year, after the dramatic state-orchestrated merger of Credit Suisse and UBS, journalists in Bern were even treated to the spectacle of government ministers reading out statements and fielding questions in English – almost unheard of at a domestic Swiss political press conference.

Finally, English can also help hugely in the job market: a report this summer by the Adecco Group found that speaking English in addition to a local Swiss language boosts your salary by 18%; English plus two Swiss languages boosts it by 20%.