un titre intéressant

Indeed, I added the sub/dub aspect in another comment

Bingo, while the affinity that the local language has with English grammar and how hard foreign languages are pushed at school are contributors, this is the main one. This is why relatively uneducated people in the Netherlands and north of it are all fluent in English, and why Italians, Spanish and French are not. I Grew up with all Hollywood movie dubbed and in general Italian television in the 80s and 90s was 100% in Italian, didn't do me any favour. It's changing, and kids now rely less on TV and more on the internet.

Anedoctally,I've been bitching about the French for a very long time, like in the meme, but in my last few visits to France in the last decade or so I had no issue interacting in English everywhere (used to be fluent in French but no more)

Finnish and Estonian are basically completely unrelated to English yet the native speakers of those languages are pretty good at English for the most part.

There is the second factor that influences how necessary English becomes to your population: the number of speakers. France, Spanish and Italian have at least 60 millions speakers, which allows them to have a dubbing industry with a significant market.

Hungary should indeed follow the same path, I don't know what's happening there either, maybe someone else would know more.

Also, Germany and Austria speak the same native language; German, yet there are more L2 English speakers in Austria than in Germany. It’s the same as comparing France with francophone Belgium.

As a Belgian, I always thought that as we are a country with a low population (French-speaking Belgians are around 4 millions), combined with being bordered by other languages (Dutch and German, English if you count the Channel) and having three national languages just naturally encourages people to be more open about learning at least one other language. Maybe a few of those similarities are also applicable to Austria.

Dubbing is usually a thing in countries with large populations. I assume it started when English proficiency was much lower and someone thought it was worth doing it instead of subtitles and then they just kept doing it. These days in Germany the big cinemas offer showings of some movies in the original language, in the past (well, for some movies still today) you had to go to special cinemas to see a movie in the original, so things are slowly changing.

Now, why do these countries dub everything I don’t know

Keeping the language alive and available to other people outside of face-to-face conversations.

One of the frustrating aspect of learning a language has a lower number of speakers (let's say under 20 millions) and dubs everything is that you can't really find content in that language to learn it. I learned Dutch for many years, and it's always kind of frustrating to not being able to find that many content (e.g. Youtube video essays for instance) as Dutch speakers would naturally produce that content in English to have a broader audience.

Which makes sense for them, but then brings the question of how relevant the language is. The Netherlands are experiencing the progressive disappearance from Dutch even more as more and more people are coming to Amsterdam and other Dutch cities, and aren't motivated to learn the language, as English is so widespread everywhere. Young Dutch speakers also tend to use more and more English in their slang.

I kind of have the same situation as I'm learning Catalan, as most of the Catalan Youtubers produce content in Castillano rather than Catalan to reach a broader audience, but then the language becomes less and less relevant. That's one of the reasons Catalans want to keep movies dubbed in Catalan, as it is a way to keep it relevant.

I'm really torn between the two approaches. I get people who say that everyone in Europe should just use English and be done with it, but at the same time, Romance languages just hit differently. It's part of the local culture, and I think it would be a waste to just let all of that disappear. Another example I have is someone I know who's perfectly proficient in English (lived in an English speaking countries for many years), but still wants to raise their children in Dutch. So at the end of the day, is that language still relevant or not?

Feel free to join !esp!esp@lemm.ee para hablar castillano

Thank you for the insight, but I indeed meant it in the other direction.

German might be harder to learn for an English speaker, but that does not mean that English is not easier for a German speaker than a Romance language speaker.

Another example of this phenomenon (one language being easier to learn from one language, but not in the other way): Romanian. Romanian is a Romance language but with a lot of Slavic influence, so for Romanian speakers it is easy to learn Spanish or Italian, but for Spanish or Italian speakers, it is harder to learn Romanian due to the additional Slavic aspects.