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In many ways London isn't just a centre for the UK, it's also a centre for Europe. i.e. if we assume a natural tendency for most young people who are able to wa

In many ways London isn't just a centre for the UK, it's also a centre for Europe. i.e. if we assume a natural tendency for most young people who are able to want to move to a more metropolitan area, then London is pretty much in the list of destinations for all European countries in a way that virtually no other city is to that extent, and it has to do with language. For example I'm in the Netherlands in my early twenties. I know pretty much 3-4 people whose German or French is good enough to consider studying or working in say Paris or Berlin. Compared to that I can easily name 100 of my peers whose English is good enough to study or work in the UK. So if they list their destination choices, it's basically Amsterdam & London miles ahead of anything else, and then come some Dutch cities like Utrecht or Rotterdam or Haarlem. Paris and Berlin are sort of on the list, but with the caveat of either 1) having to take a job that's way below what you could have had in the Netherlands or UK, a job where language isn't important, e.g. waiting tables when you have a Master's in marketing, because landing a marketing job on your level in German or Spanish or Italian or French is just not doable without knowing the language very well. 2) investing a few years into mastering the language, a significant (opportunity) cost. Of course there are exceptions, like international English-speaking companies/jobs in France, but you'll find most jobs in Germany require German, in France requires French, in Spain requires Spanish, same for university education (although English programmes are rapidly on the rise, particularly at the Master's level and in certain fields like business schools), and obviously not everyone in Europe speaks fluent English, but if you look at the ratios, language should play a major factor. Either way, at the end of the day young people in say Spain either choose Madrid or Barcelona or a few other cities like Sevilla/Valencia, or London. In the Netherlands they choose Amsterdam, a few smaller cities, and London. In France they choose Paris, maybe Marseille or Lyon, and London. etc etc. In effect, London is the top destination city for the EU, a union of 500 million people who require no visa or permission or anything like that to move and work anywhere else in the EU including London, and 40% of them speak English as a second language. Every other city is either not the top dog (e.g. Liverpool), or excludes hundreds of other millions of Europeans straight away on the basis of language (e.g. any city in the Netherlands (99% of EU doesn't know Dutch as 2nd language), Germany (86% of EU doesn't speak German as 2nd language), Spain (93%), France (86%), Italy (97%) etc). Then add to that a similar language-driven attraction from the US, Asia, middle east, who must all be rich as they'd need a visa, and you get this ridiculous demand for London fuelling network effects and feedback loops. The demand has led to some pretty perverse mass-gentrification as of late and to a large extent it's from natural (language, in particular) causes I think rather than very specific British policies which obviously also play a role but not a dominating one I think (outside of course the concept of the EU which plays a huge role in not discriminating between any member of the EU and prevents the UK from just having to deal with the problem of balancing London as a centre of the UK and forces it to deal with the problem of balancing London as a centre of the EU, but that's an EU policy not a UK or London policy).

thorin 11y ago
This is an excellent post, but in the experience of colleagues I've had in the EU doing software development, BA, management etc is that for most jobs with international companies in whichever city they are able to work in English. It does happen that a lot of the jobs are in London, but also Switzerland (banking), Brussels (EU admin), and quite a bit in Scandinavia also (generally not EU I know).
- IkmoIkmo 11y ago
  I agree, there's a fair bit. It's tricky to find numbers, and it's definitely really in flux, offices that speak English today would sometimes have been unthinkable 10 years ago. Fun story, worked at foreign affairs as an intern some years ago and due to the nature of our work being international and so much of our communication with partners etc, our papers, presentations and research etc was English, it was proposed to start having meetings in English, too, so we wouldn't have to translate any English documentation we might be discussing. Again, foreign affairs, a job you can only get if you're a national of the country, that requires you to sign documents you won't disclose state secrets etc, obviously it's by its nature a pretty chauvinistic affair so I thought that was funny. Another interesting remark is that they used to require you to speak French, too, to work at foreign affairs, for decades and decades this was THE diplomatic language of the world and you couldn't get a job unless you spoke it fluently. (same thing for the UN for example, Ban Ki Moon had to take intense classes in French to get his job although somehow he got a pass as his French is beyond horrible), but at foreign affairs they also let go of this French requirement. It's still beneficial but it's no longer mandatory. How times have changed. Finally a fun anecdote about the role of French in history and some thoughts about where language might go in the future, I remember when reading war and peace where the Russian aristocracy's command of French is much better than their Russian, and as Russia is invaded by France, they scramble for tutors to improve their Russian lest they're deemed 'too French' in a Russia at war with France. It reminds me of arab family members who went to French private schools in arab speaking countries, and their arabic is pretty bad because of it. It's kind of funny in that in history the elite were often relatively multilingual and internationally oriented, but the rest (the vast majority) was not, and instead spoke the local language (or even dialect) and was locally oriented. Each spoke the language of their network, one which was relatively large, the other which was local with most people never traveling 50km from where they were born, or communicate with people outside that radius. But with the advent of modern tech, we're seeing dirt cheap long-distance communication networks, relatively cheap transport etc etc, you know the story... and I wonder if that will create language homogeneity in the world on a scale we've never seen before, when the majority of the population starts speaking a more international standard language (like say French was for some centuries the standard international language of elites, only now it's not confined to the top 1%). With the above anecdotes I can hardly imagine we won't all be speaking English/Spanish/Chinese/Arabic/Hindi as our first language next century, and everything else as our second, just like the Russian elite spoke French first, Russian second, and some of my family French first, Arabic second, and I in my professional life (and increasingly personal) English first, Dutch second. It'd take some major conflict to flare up nationalist notions to preserve the hundreds of languages different people now have as their 'first' language, like it took the invasion of Russia for the Russian elite to denounce French culture and fashion and choose Russian first. Anyway I definitely share your experiences back home in the Netherlands but then I did always pick international jobs. But more generally speaking, there's tons of jobs where I'd absolutely have to speak Dutch, virtually anything client-facing, most B2B comms is Dutch still and I've read a few times on Glassdoor of employees complaining that despite the company being internationally-oriented, Dutch is still used a fair bit and they feel left out of conversations (often non-work convos). That doesn't say much about what you can get away with, if you wanted you could probably speak to 95% of customers, partners and colleagues in English just fine, but it says something about what is expected and happens in practice, which is surprising as the Dutch do speak a ton of English and they even enjoy it (to the extent a big complaint from foreigners is that they can't practice Dutch because if you try a sentence, the Dutch person will switch to English. But that's 1 on 1, if you're the only foreigner in a bar or workplace with 6 Dutch friends/colleagues, Dutch is still very much the norm and that's why it's still a requirement for most jobs. In looking abroad for jobs in say Spain I still feel the jobs I can pick where English is good enough are pretty narrow and I really only have the option of a narrow selection of jobs, same for France, Germany slightly less so but there too. And the further out you go, Italy for example, it gets worse. In London I can land any job - except translation or teaching jobs where native proficiency is really crucial - the difference is pretty big.

thorin 11y ago

This is an excellent post, but in the experience of colleagues I've had in the EU doing software development, BA, management etc is that for most jobs with international companies in whichever city they are able to work in English. It does happen that a lot of the jobs are in London, but also Switzerland (banking), Brussels (EU admin), and quite a bit in Scandinavia also (generally not EU I know).

IkmoIkmo 11y ago
I agree, there's a fair bit. It's tricky to find numbers, and it's definitely really in flux, offices that speak English today would sometimes have been unthinkable 10 years ago. Fun story, worked at foreign affairs as an intern some years ago and due to the nature of our work being international and so much of our communication with partners etc, our papers, presentations and research etc was English, it was proposed to start having meetings in English, too, so we wouldn't have to translate any English documentation we might be discussing. Again, foreign affairs, a job you can only get if you're a national of the country, that requires you to sign documents you won't disclose state secrets etc, obviously it's by its nature a pretty chauvinistic affair so I thought that was funny. Another interesting remark is that they used to require you to speak French, too, to work at foreign affairs, for decades and decades this was THE diplomatic language of the world and you couldn't get a job unless you spoke it fluently. (same thing for the UN for example, Ban Ki Moon had to take intense classes in French to get his job although somehow he got a pass as his French is beyond horrible), but at foreign affairs they also let go of this French requirement. It's still beneficial but it's no longer mandatory. How times have changed. Finally a fun anecdote about the role of French in history and some thoughts about where language might go in the future, I remember when reading war and peace where the Russian aristocracy's command of French is much better than their Russian, and as Russia is invaded by France, they scramble for tutors to improve their Russian lest they're deemed 'too French' in a Russia at war with France. It reminds me of arab family members who went to French private schools in arab speaking countries, and their arabic is pretty bad because of it. It's kind of funny in that in history the elite were often relatively multilingual and internationally oriented, but the rest (the vast majority) was not, and instead spoke the local language (or even dialect) and was locally oriented. Each spoke the language of their network, one which was relatively large, the other which was local with most people never traveling 50km from where they were born, or communicate with people outside that radius. But with the advent of modern tech, we're seeing dirt cheap long-distance communication networks, relatively cheap transport etc etc, you know the story... and I wonder if that will create language homogeneity in the world on a scale we've never seen before, when the majority of the population starts speaking a more international standard language (like say French was for some centuries the standard international language of elites, only now it's not confined to the top 1%). With the above anecdotes I can hardly imagine we won't all be speaking English/Spanish/Chinese/Arabic/Hindi as our first language next century, and everything else as our second, just like the Russian elite spoke French first, Russian second, and some of my family French first, Arabic second, and I in my professional life (and increasingly personal) English first, Dutch second. It'd take some major conflict to flare up nationalist notions to preserve the hundreds of languages different people now have as their 'first' language, like it took the invasion of Russia for the Russian elite to denounce French culture and fashion and choose Russian first. Anyway I definitely share your experiences back home in the Netherlands but then I did always pick international jobs. But more generally speaking, there's tons of jobs where I'd absolutely have to speak Dutch, virtually anything client-facing, most B2B comms is Dutch still and I've read a few times on Glassdoor of employees complaining that despite the company being internationally-oriented, Dutch is still used a fair bit and they feel left out of conversations (often non-work convos). That doesn't say much about what you can get away with, if you wanted you could probably speak to 95% of customers, partners and colleagues in English just fine, but it says something about what is expected and happens in practice, which is surprising as the Dutch do speak a ton of English and they even enjoy it (to the extent a big complaint from foreigners is that they can't practice Dutch because if you try a sentence, the Dutch person will switch to English. But that's 1 on 1, if you're the only foreigner in a bar or workplace with 6 Dutch friends/colleagues, Dutch is still very much the norm and that's why it's still a requirement for most jobs. In looking abroad for jobs in say Spain I still feel the jobs I can pick where English is good enough are pretty narrow and I really only have the option of a narrow selection of jobs, same for France, Germany slightly less so but there too. And the further out you go, Italy for example, it gets worse. In London I can land any job - except translation or teaching jobs where native proficiency is really crucial - the difference is pretty big.