Another Mopar Off My Bucket List - Barracuda Fastback

Funny you should ask about English in Sweden. I just wrote a PM to Rumblefish360 on this topic yesterday.

Sweden is a country of 9M people and a unique language. Sure, all three Scandinavian countries have a lot in common language wise but still, we are too small to afford dubbing everything foreign. France, Germany, Spain and Italy dub everything, even interviews in news broadcasts. We don't. We use subtitles everywhere. This leads to an automatic learning of English up to a certain level, English being the dominating language of showbiz. On top of that, all school children take compulsory English from age 10 to age 18 (unless you drop out at 16).

Why? Well, Sweden is an export nation. Throughout history, we've depended on trade to supply us with things that can't be grown here. We used to do an enormous amount of business with the Hansa, the German trade organization of the 13th to 17th (corrected - I checked) centuries. In modern time, Germany has always been a large market for us. We even sold ore to the nazis to avoid war ... Not our proudest moment.

But in the last century, the U.K. and the US has snatched the top spot for language influence even if I think exports to Germany (which is in the EU after all) exceed that to the US. I'm no sure about that, though (I checked, Germany alone accounts for 50% more than our US Export and we import more than five times more from Germany than the US. Lots of Audis on the roads here ...).

So no, immigration is not the cause for us knowing English. :)