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 French-speaking Switzerland, says the results, while not representative of the entire country, provide a good picture for those wanting to improve their English.

The report’s methodology, consistent over 13 editions, ensures a stable range of respondents and valid emerging trends.

He notes a drop in young people’s scores in recent years, correlating with the Covid-19 pandemic and school closures. He also highlights differences between German- and French-speaking parts of Switzerland, aligning with the perception that English proficiency is higher in Basel than in Lausanne. This makes sense given the higher English standards in German-speaking schools, while French-speaking schools emphasize German alongside English.

Morel and EF believe the ranking is valuable: “There is no other dataset of comparable size and scope,” EF writes. “Despite its limitations, many policymakers, scholars, and analysts consider it a valuable reference 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.

Schwendimann will wait for the next PISA study results in December to note any long-term slippage. PISA also plans a new foreign language assessment in 2025 to gather more data on global English proficiency, but only for teenagers.

In the meantime, Schwendimann speculates that any decline could be due to Swiss multilingualism. Unlike other countries where English is the clear second language, Switzerland has four national languages and a diverse history of immigration, creating a lot of competition. Another reason could be less exposure to English, as internet sites and Netflix streams are easily translatable to German, French, or Italian with a single click.

The new lingua franca

English is widely spoken in Switzerland, whether well or not. It has become the second-most spoken language in workplaces, surpassing French. Nowadays, it’s common to hear German- and French-speaking Swiss conversing in English, which sparks debates about national identity, cohesion, and education policy.

In March, after the dramatic merger of Credit Suisse and UBS, government ministers in Bern read statements and answered questions in English. This was almost unheard of at a Swiss political press conference.

English is also valuable in the job market. A report by the Adecco Group found that speaking English and a local Swiss language boosts your salary by 18%. Knowing English and two Swiss languages increases it by 20%.