Comment by _delirium

It’s definitely common in Denmark, enough that it’s a perennial national debate. Maersk is a huge employer that officially made their corporate language English something like 20 years ago, which spawned discussions about whether you should need to speak a foreign language to get a job in your own country. In practice the answer is yes, for some sectors.

I worked for years in an English-language work environment in Denmark (I am not Danish), and learned maybe a handful of phrases of spoken Danish the entire time. I was expected to be able to read the occasional email in Danish, but 1) written Danish is not hard in comparison, and 2) even years ago Google Translate was good enough.

It would have been nice from a social perspective to have known more spoken Danish, but my employer didn’t really care, and it isn’t easy to learn if you don’t have strong local connections. Danes will just immediately switch to English by default, and even if you ask them to continue in Danish, you need a decent level of Danish pronunciation to make yourself understood, which is not trivial to get to.