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Except that in the nascent EU single market, the native language is English. Of course you should be fluent in the language of the country in which you work/live, but increasingly this will be less important - assuming that the EU wants any chance of competing with US/China that is.

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It's a single market, not a single country.

There are plenty of companies in Germany that have English as a working language, but even then local teams are better served by people with good local language proficiency.

> assuming that the EU wants any chance of competing with US/China that is

Germany can import/export and trade with everyone outside of Germany without dumbing down their population to people with a vocabulary of 100 words. Cross border trade language may be English, but domestic business language is German.

My understanding is that trade in goods within the Single Market has worked very well, but trade in services not so much - not least due to language barriers. This becomes an issue because service based businesses (which includes law, finance, and creative industries, as well as hairdressing) also benefit from economies of scale - witness the relative success of Silicon Valley and Hollywood, with an immediate market of ~350MM people.

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