Basque Country

[goldvermilion87]

How common or uncommon would it be for someone who lived in Basque country to speak English?  I am not finding anything about that online

The reason I would like to know, is that I want to put a small family in a story where at least the parents neither speak nor understand English. Another character recognizes this because he can tell where they

Comments

[channonyarrow]

I had a friend in Valencia whose mother knew Spanish, but preferred Catalan, and had no English at all, if that helps. Her husband spoke at least Spanish, English and Catalan, and may have spoken French; the kids all spoke Spanish, Catalan and a third language - as I recall, two spoke English and the third knew German. So that's extremely anecdotal, but I guess I would say that it's entirely reasonable to assume, particularly in Spain, that someone doesn't speak English

[kuiskata]

I googled "school curriculum Basque" and the first two results to come up were this:

English Education in the Basque Country
and
English in the Basque Country

This should give you a place to start, at least (I only skimmed the articles, but the second article does state as a reason Basque students have trouble with English: "Parents' knowledge of English. French used to be the main foreign language learned at school up to the 1980's and many parents do not speak English."). It looks like there might be a few more pages that might be useful with those keywords, too.

Edited for HTML fail

[sashatwen]

Even today it's quite possible to go through school in Germany without studying English at all.

Are you absolutely sure? Cause I am quite sure that if you choose French as your first language, you have to take English as your second one. You might suck at it because you've only had it for a few years, but at least you're bound to have some education, I think.

Of course, this entirely depends on the time period, but it's been like that for a whole while, I think.

[aim_of_destiny]

If the story is set "now-ish", then a teenaged or older German person's parents might well not speak English at all, especially if they're from East Germany.

Generally speaking, you can expect anybody under 30 or so to speak at least some English. With people older than that it's kind of a crapshoot, though. So having German parents in their 40s or 50s speak very fragmented or no English is not unrealistic at all.

Relevant anecdata: my cousin, now 18, speaks half-decent English but has dropped the subject in school two years ago. My maternal grandfather taught himself English when I was little - about 15-20 years ago. Both my parents can get by in a conversation, while my maternal grandmother would understand a lot of what is being said (because she speaks Platt, or Low German), while not being able to kludge a comprehensible sentence together. So you can see there's a mix of ability levels going on.
We're in Bremen and Niedersachsen, working class through middle class, just to give you some perspective.

WARNING: CONTAINS ANECDOTES

[13chapters]

I've met a few people from the Basque region. Most of them spoke English; one did not. (He was traveling with his girlfriend, who did speak English.) I'm sure that the numbers were skewed, however, by the fact that I met all of them abroad, as I've never been to Spain.

In my experience, Western Europeans who speak Germanic languages as their first language (German, Dutch, the Scandinavian languages) are most likely to speak English. Romance language speakers are less likely to do so. But I don't know that there's any place where someone is automatically going to assume that someone from a specific place won't be able to speak English. Even in my village in Eastern Europe, you couldn't assume that someone wouldn't be able to speak English. (Although it was usually a good bet!)

[sashatwen]

English was a facultative language in the former GDR. Russian was the compulsory first language, then you could choose between English and French in 7th year. If the parents both went for French, it's entirely possible they would only know the odd word of English you pick up from listening to songs on the radio and such. So a family from Eastern Germany would make sense, too. However, it would probably not be terribly *common* in that area not to know any English. I'd rather go for Eastern Europe if you want to increase the likelihood.

(I am German and my parents never had any English education. But they're in their 70s and that's a different story.)

[lied_ohne_worte]

And even age is not a guarantee for not having learned English. My parents are 66 and 67, and my mother is very good (she started studying for being an English teacher), while my father could probably get along somehow, albeit with a godawful accent and not that good a feel for the language. We tend to cut him some slack for that because he knows four other foreign languages and has sufficient French to have studied for a while in French-speaking Switzerland. But then of course my parents are neither from East Germany nor from near the French border, and they're both on the upper end of the education scale.

In contrast, a friend who is my age comes from Saarland, and he indeed had French as the first foreign language, after which I think he might have taken Latin. I'm not sure if he ever really had English at school. In any case, he only has rudimentary grammar and vocabulary.