English is the most widely spoken language in the world. And of the roughly 1. 5 billion speakers globally, the vast majority speak it as a second language. So where are the world's best non-native English speakers? According to a new report by EF Education First, an international education company, Northern Europeans are the most fluent. Middle Easterners are the least proficient (精通的).

The index (指数) is based on the results of a free online test taken by 2. 3 million volunteers in 100 countries. Nearly six in ten of this year's test-takers were female. Women have always performed better than men, but this year men closed the gap somewhat.

In Europe, the powerhouse economies perform surprisingly badly: only Germany makes the top place of "very high proficiency" countries. France is next, while Spain and Italy are continuously falling behind. A study by a Spanish research institute reported the bad news: 60% of adults say they speak no English at all. The fact that Spanish is a global language in its own right (the language declares 400 million native speakers) is probably the cause. If you speak Danish, you need another language to take part in global culture; speaking French or Spanish (or Arabic) means hundreds of millions of people to talk to without English.

Asia is the region of greatest diversity (多样性). Only Singapore makes the top level, but the Philippines, Malaysia, and India are not far behind. China is further back but still in the second level, a few places ahead of Japan. Struggling in the bottom places are a group of South-East and Central Asian countries like Cambodia and Kyrgyzstan. This relates with another factor: the company repeatedly finds that English skills are highly related with connections and openness to the rest of the world.