[saiya-jin]

National egos will probably prevent that. I simply can't imagine French people speaking anything but french in their home country. Anytime I visit the place (which is almost every weekend), I see how much they don't like speaking english, although their level is OK and they are perfectly understandable. Italy might be the same, Spain too.

Northern europe has much stronger usage of english and level is much higher (I recall old grannies responding in perfect english around Oslo, and that was almost 20 years ago).

[simias]

I think us French are generally pretty terrible for this, there's definitely a strong anti-English bias (although oddly splicing random English words in a terrible French accent in everyday discussions is seen as fashionable by what seems to be a growing portion of the population).

On the other hand I've never had any issue speaking English in Germany or Portugal for instance, to the point where I kind of became lazy and expected people there to actually understand English and being surprised a couple of times to find somebody who didn't.

But you're right, I can certainly imagine a significant portion of the French people and institutions fighting back hard if the EU ever decides to move towards English as official language.

[hansoolo]

It's true for the northern countries. I remember being in Stockholm once and everybody was speaking a decent English, from little kids to grannies. They said it's because they don't have dubbing on TV and learn it faster and better that way. :)