How common is It for people imigrate to your country without being fluent of your official language?

15 comments

1. Fairly common; Danish is practically _only_ spoken in Denmark as an everyday language—to a lesser degree in Greenland and in the Faroe Islands—so most people who come here, don’t learn the language beforehand. That said, as a prerequisite for citizenship, you need to pass some language exams, but there are plenty of programs offering to teach people Danish.

2. They’re not fluent even after living here for 40 years.

   The right question would be ‘how common is it for people to imigrate to your country being fluent in your official language?’. And the answer would be extremely uncommon.

3. Very common in the Netherlands, especially in the Randstad and even more particularly in Amsterdam.

4. It happens quite a lot, but the locals don’t really notice it, as they don’t really mingle because of lack of communication. What follows are reddit/forum posts by immigrants/”expats” on why they don’t find *Swiss* friends. As a consequence there are immigrant bubbles which are created in which those people only have non-local friends and get isolated from everyone else. It annoys me if immigrants come here but they don’t *try* to learn the languages even after *years*.

   Suprisingly the nationalist parties don’t care about those, as they bring good labour, but refugees who get integrated faster (imo) get bashed on.

5. Very common. Only exception are the Swedes whose mother tongue is Swedish, which also the other national language in Finland, but the immigration from Sweden is negligible.

6. Very common. Many immigrants only speak English, they get hired by multi-national companies with offices in Switzerland and move here based on that.

   >in these cases consider the most spoken of them.

   That’s a ridiculous thing to say. Switzerland has four national languages, but with that classification every French citizen moving to french speaking Switzerland would be counted as someone moving somewhere where they don’t speak the language even though they speak it perfectly. Meanwhile you’d not count the Swiss German speaker moving to the French speaking part of Switzerland despite them not being able to communicate at all.

7. very common, there aren’t much possibilities to learn Czech before moving here.

8. Yes, it’s super common. Especially with the older generation guest workers that came here from the 1950ies on and stayed. Those were people with not much intent to stay for longer in first place and on the other hand many of them had no idea what studying a foreign language as an adult means. And not much time for it either as they in general had rather low paying jobs and had to work their asses off to make a living.

9. This happens pretty frequently here.

   A *lot* of people move to Brussels with dreams of being the next great European leader, while completely ignoring the local stuff around them and barely being able to put a sentence together in French. (Don’t even ask them about learning Flemish!)

   A lot of these people are trainees/interns who are here for a year or two, and yeah, I have some *opinions* after working around some of these people for a while, but I’ll save those for a different forum.

   To a lesser extent this happens in the major cities in Flanders – Antwerp, Ghent and Leuven – although instead of chasing dreams of being some Eurocrat, everyone’s here to do a master’s for a year. The are relatively fewer English-language programs in Wallonia, so the French-speaking side of Belgium doesn’t really get this issue too much.

   As a consequence to all of this, the various Belgian subreddits all get about 1-2 posts a week about “Why Belgians are so standoffish?”, or, “Why can’t I find any local friends?” or “How easy is it to get a job as an English-speaker?”

10. Latin Americans apart, quite common. Educated migrants rather northern countries.

11. Sweden:

    Very common, just about no one learns Swedish before moving here, except maybe Finnish people and Norwegians who live close to the border.

    One caveat though:
    A lot of people that migrate to Swedish are Swedes who have studied abroad, worked in another country or just spent a year in France or whatever, and any children they might have had while living in another country. I don’t feel like trudging through current statistics, but I know that some years a majority of the people who immigrated to Sweden where Swedish citizens. A friend of mine was born in Sweden to Swedish parents, and has immigrated four times (once from Argentina, thrice from Norway), and is planning for a fifth. So the number of immigrants is not the same as the number of people who move here without knowing Swedish.

12. Very common. French isn’t easy but some people don’t even try. Met a dude the other day that didn’t speak a word of French and has been living there for 20+ yrs.
    Things are quite easier if you learn the language.

13. Fairly common in germany. Older folks from turkey partially refuse to learn german or english and just rely on their kids that go to school here for translations. But most of them are terrible at translating because they only speak their parents language at home.

    I dont blame the kids, its not like I was able to translate german to english in any reasonable way during my school years.

14. Well, Slovakia isn’t a country where most people desire to move to. Therefore we don’t have many expats here but the ones we have, they usually aren’t fluent in Slovak.

    There are a few expats in Bratislava but it’s not that common because in order to get a job, you will most likely need to speak Slovak. There are a couple few jobs where you only need English though and those are the jobs that expats usually have in Slovakia.

    Then there are few people who get married to a Slovak person and then move here but that’s also quite rare. (It happened in my family actually so it does happen but overall it’s rare). These people also usually don’t speak Slovak but they make an effort to learn it after moving here and occasionally they might start learning even before they move here.

    And then the last group of expats are university students who study in Slovakia. Usually medicine students from the Middle East, India or occasionally even from western countries like Germany or Norway. I don’t quite get why people from western Europe move here to study, if it’s cheaper or if they didn’t get into med school in their own country? No clue. Regardless of that, these people study in English therefore they don’t really need to learn Slovak. They can easily get by with using just English if they’re only planning on studying here and not getting a job or something like that.

15. You can find British people who came here 30 years ago and who don’t speak a word of Spanish. And I’m not joking. The rest, even though some people come without any knowledge of Spanish, learn fairly quickly and easily, especially the younger generations