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Yes, an important point. This is one thing the Netherlands is far better at than Germany (Frankfurt). I think it's because Dutch is spoken by rather few people globally, whereas German has ~100m speakers, so the pressure to learn English there isn't as strong.

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No, it has nothing to do with that. It's policy driven. The Dutch realized they can get in on what the UK was getting if they swallowed their pride and started speaking more English and allowing English as a language of business.

Germans are too proud and expect the world to start speaking German instead.

I lived in both countries, Germans have equally good English, but you would struggle to use English in official capacity in Germany. Whereas in the Netherlands they are very accommodating, and not because they are kinder. They do this on purpose, cause they know they can (and did in fact) attract a lot of foreign money that way.

Hmmm, I haven't found it to be true that Germans and Dutch people speak English equally well. There really is a pronounced difference, especially in the older generations, but also in younger generations. I speak German when in Germany, so of course I have some bias, but there is evidence to back this up [1].

As for how intentional it is, your theory seems plausible. That said, I don't know of any real evidence for it — even if it is an organized conspiracy, most normal Dutch citizens aren't aware of it.

[1]: https://www.wittenborg.eu/netherlands-top-english-speaking-c...

If you were using the same arguments about the French instead of the Germans, I'd agree. However, for (us) Germans I wouldn't say it's so much proudness as it is about having a huge market by itself (like GP said) and also its industries are very strong, meaning Germany doesn't have to rely on being a tax haven or its financial services as much as other countries. I do agree that Germans have a certain proudness but arguably since WW2 we are also more humbled than we probably were before and it still shows (also because of how much we are being humbled by our education and also by our media culture. Not as much as the Japanese, though :)).

I spent considerable amount of time in both countries and I can clearly say that Germans are not even close to Dutch in their english or willingness to learn english. I don't even want to talk about technology adoption in Germany. That is another discussion.

Top best english speakers are either Dutch or Swedish in mainland Europe.

It's actually the Danes, without question, but they seem to rate themselves poorly in the self-surveys that produce these "No. 1 in English" rankings.

Office-job professionals in all three countries are very good, but for the best chance of the bus driver, kiosk owner, refuse collector, window cleaner, passing pensioner and drunk punk to speak English, head to Denmark.

I live in Copenhagen at this moment :)

Dutch language is relatively close to English.

Dutch people learn English at young age. British English at school.

Tech industry practically has English as main language. It is not like that in Germany or French.

Dutch people are used to focus on trade with foreign countries. Helps if you speak the language. Youth learn Dutch, English, French and German at school.

Finally, Allies liberated us from the Germans. We remained on friendly terms with each other, though NL is not part of FVEY.

Contrast to French and Germsn, which are both still important languages in both Europe and the World; Dutch is irrelevant...

The quality of spoken English in Germany is mediocre at best and often non-existing or terrible with adults. At least it was two years ago when I visited.

I have a feeling there was no swallowing of pride or anything like that, but it was all Hollywood and market size: US movies/TV series shown in Germany get dubbed with German voices because there's a huge German/Austrian/Swiss market (in terms of population), while for smaller markets like Dutch and the Nordic countries, it was/is a lot more economical to just put local language subtitles on them.

France also has a lot of eyeballs, and they also get dubbed entertainment products.

Whatever it is, they have been doing it for a long time: ladies in their 70s, in the street or at the supermarket, switch seamlessly to English when they realise I don't speak Dutch.

I think another reason is that kids tv shows used to be broadcasted with English dubs and Dutch subs. That's how many kids learned English, myself included.

Sadly they've moved away from that practice. Everything's Dutch dubbed now.

I would imagine that now English content would be even more easy to obtain as most mediums now support multiple languages flawlessly.

Defaults matter.

Also, video games tended to not be translated into dutch. Mainly because it is suchs a small language. Me and most of my peers learned most english from playing video games and watching movies and tv shows with subtitels, mostly because spoken dutch was not available.

How did that work with games? Did you have to stop and look things up, or did you already have a rough idea and just the exposure increased your fluency?

I’ve tried putting my phone/computer into other languages, but within a few days I tend to phase out the changes and I don’t think I learned much.

Games that lean on conversation, Assassin's Creed for example, will sometimes have Dutch subtitles. Those helped me when I was younger, also enabling English subtitles in series and games.

But tbh a big thing is the exposure at a young age, I tried to do the same thing with Spanish series but a new language simply doesn't stick as well as it did 15 years ago.

They were dubbed for the very young back 30 years ago, and still are.

I prefer to watch in original language (often means English though I am quite fond of German cinema) with English subs. But my mother (~70) would prefer Dutch subs, Dutch dub, or Dutch movie.

Its fantastic we got so much choice. Perfect to practice another language, dabble into it. As already mentioned though, defaults matter.

A crazy stat for me is that as a percentage of population more people in the Netherlands speak English than do in the US. When people in the US ask me for recommendations as to where to go in Europe I suggest the Netherlands first because it’s so incredibly easy to get around with just English.

> A crazy stat for me is that as a percentage of population more people in the Netherlands speak English than do in the US.

The US is very diverse.

A fun stat is that there are over 600 languages spoken in New York metro, making it one of the most linguistically diverse areas in the world.

https://www.6sqft.com/new-map-shows-over-600-languages-spoke...

Oh goodness do I know it! I worked on education software messaging there. Schools have to have so many resources just to be able to speak to parents.

It’s also because Dutch is closer to English. Frisian is the closest language to Old English.

Unfortunately modern English is rather different to Old English. I can read later Middle English (Chaucer to Shakespear) with some difficulty but Old English is very hard.

The WP page on Frisian Languages has this to say early on: "However, modern English and Frisian are not mutually intelligible, nor are Frisian languages intelligible among themselves, due to independent linguistic innovations and foreign influences."

To give you a tiny idea of what we are up against here consider the name of the town I live in: Yeovil. When I first came here I thought - French obvs! Yeo-ville ie the town on the river Yeo. Hmm how wrong can I get: actually it was called Gifle in the 500s or so, which means "bend in the river" in a Saxonish language long gone - that's your old Frisian/German/Dutch/Angle thing. Morph the G into a Y and the f into a v, throw in a vowel shift and squint a bit and there you go. There are over 60 spellings recorded for this little town, including Euwell, Evill, Ivel and Gevelle. The local rugby team is called the Ivel Barbarians. The river is actually named after the town, which is named for a feature in the river! In Germany there is a town called Wegburg (I had my ears operated on in the hospital there in the '70s) and in England there is a town called Weybury - that one is easy to work out.

Now pull back and look at modern English, Dutch, the Frisian collection of languages, German etc ie all the languages that are collected together as "Germanic". They are all rather different these days. I can't even pronounce van Gogh properly despite having a Dutchman repeatedly telling me how (something like "fan hoch"). I can say Moenchengladbach well enough but lets face it the name is pretty obvious even if you ignore the umlaut and the ch sound at the end - both sounds don't exist in modern English. I failed German O level but on the bright side I also failed French too.

I don't know how correct this is linguistically, but it rings true for me anecdotally. The company I work for is headquartered in Amsterdam and when I hear my Dutch colleagues talking to each other some snippets have an eerily English feel in terms of their rhythm, tone and sound[0]. The best way I can describe it is by reference to this image: https://twitter.com/melip0ne/status/1120503955526750208 - it's composed of familiar looking blobs, but after a few seconds you know you don't recognise it at all and your pattern-matching circuits are just being a bit over-eager. That's the feeling I often get when I hear Dutch.

[0] - of course the "gh" sound is not present in English so when that pops up you are immediately jolted back to reality. It's not even like the Scots "ch", it's further down the throat.

Haha I can confirm this as well. Two Dutch colleagues talking to each other in Dutch, I thought they were talking in English but I could not understand it, my brain got confused but then realised its not English.

the dutch speak better english than the englishmen in liverpool lol.

100m of German speakers are concentrated in three neighbor countries: Germany, Austria, Switzerland. It's not like a German can go to a different continent and find people speaking their language (like a Spanish or French person would). I don't really understand their unwillingness to learn foreign languages - is it just their pride? :)

They definitely learn, it is Europe after all, they just don't use it as much for business.

Also, in my experience, learning english to do bussiness with other european who also learn english mainly for bussiness purposes gives a different kind of language then learning english for everyday use. see also "euro english"[0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euro_English

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