António Costa with Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez
The Portuguese have “very high proficiency” in English, unlike the Spanish, who scratch their tongue, and the Brazilians — who are a disgrace. Among the various reasons for this difference, one is preponderant: the films and series we watch are not dubbed.
Portugal is one of the 15 countries in the first tier of the 2025 edition of , the largest global ranking of countries and regions by proficiency in English, which continues to be led by the Netherlandswith 624 points.
Our country, which moved up one place, is in 6th positionwith 612 points, behind Croatia, Austria, Germany and Norway. Poland, with 600 points, closes the group of “Very High Proficiency“.
O Cambodia, with 390 points and “Very Low Proficiency”, completes the list of 123 countries evaluated by Education First, a company dedicated to education founded in 1965 and based in Zurich.
The evolution of the trend registered a consistent rise since 2011the year in which the Portuguese obtained a classification of 509 points (“High Proficiency”).
According to the EPI, the Portuguese have very high proficiency in reading (632 points) and listen (610 points), elevated to write (550 points) and moderate speaking (502 points).
By professional activityit is students (650), legal workers (643) and customer support workers (617) who speak English best. The worst ratings are obtained in the administrative (560) areas of operations (575) and accounting and finance (594).
A Coimbra region (635 points) is the one where English is spoken best in Portugal. At the other extreme, Bragança: 561 points.
EF EPI
English Proficiency – Global Ranking of Countries and Regions 2025
Why are we so good
One of the most surprising aspects of the 2025 Global Ranking of Countries and Regions is the position in which we find Spain and Brazil.
The Spanish, our next-door neighbors and with a language, like ours, originating in Latin, are classified in the 36th position, with 540which corresponds to a Moderate Proficiency.
Even more surprising is the position of Brazilians, who speak the same language as the Portuguese (or something similar) who obtain only 482 points, corresponding to a Low English Proficiency.
Why do people with so many cultural and linguistic aspects in common, how do the Portuguese, Brazilians and Spanish have such different proficiencies in English?
They are several explanations given to this disparity, including, in the case of Spaniards, the popular idea that their difficulty in English may result from “physical differences in the structure of the oral cavity” that would cause “phonetic changes” — an idea without any scientific basis.
The main reason given for our proficiency is a cultural factor very simple: in Portugal, films and series shown on TV are subtitledare not doubled, as happens in Brazil and Spain.
This means that Portuguese people grow up listening to English constantly on TV and in the cinema. In Spain and Brazil, where almost all foreign content is dubbed, there is no natural exposure to the language.
There are other explanations for this disparity, usually related to the huge difference in the size of the population, the economy and cultural industry between Portugal and the other two countries.
According to these explanations, with only 10 million inhabitants, the Portuguese market is small, which forces people to look outside and master English to access content, business and employment opportunities International. Spain (47M) and Brazil (215M) have huge domestic markets, where it is possible to live comfortably in Spanish/Portuguese alone.
The Portuguese also got used to consume music, podcastsvideos and digital content in English. In Spain and Brazil, there are giant cultural industries that produce everything in Spanish / Portugueseaccording to one of the possible explanations.
Furthermore, in Portugal, the English entered the school curriculum early and has remained consistent and progressive over decades, being seen as a practical and not just an academic skill.
In Spain, for a long time, the language teaching was more theoretical and based on grammar, with less emphasis on orality. In Brazil, the quality of public English education is very uneven and, in many cases, insufficient to ensure functional fluency.
What will then be the real reason for our fluency in English? Probably a combination of all these factors. But one of them is, apparently, the fundamental factor: It’s the subtitles!
This conclusion is supported by several scientific studies carried out in recent years. This is the case of one of the National Bureau of Economic Researchpublished in July 2025, which concluded that countries that use subtitling have proficiency in English superior to countries that use dubbing.
Another, published in 2019 in Journal of Economic Behavior & Organizationhad already concluded that subtitling increases 16.9% scores on the TOEFL (Test of English as a Foreign Language) tests, and that TV is especially beneficial for “listening comprehension“.
The fact that the films and series in Portugal are subtitled is then the main reason for our ease of understanding English — more reading and listening than writing and speaking, as concluded by the EPI index.
A RTP did some experiments with dubbing of Brazilian soap operas and some series in the 1970s/1980s, and some cable channels occasionally experimented with dubbing series, but without much public support.
Thus, with the exception of children’s content, regularly dubbed into Portuguese, there has never been a tradition of dubbing in our country; adult audiences are so used to subtitles that they usually rejects folding, considering it artificial — or preferring hear the actors’ original voices.
And then, do you talk to me?
