I don't know about FF14s EU servers but in most other MMORPGs it can be pretty horrible. Most can speak english but not very good, you just can't communicate properly. There's also more isolation going on; swedish guilds, polish guilds, russian guilds etc.

And that's just on an average server. Picking an EU server is like throwing dice. Some countries dominate the servers and I remember one time in WoW when I was looking for a good server to join I ended up scouting a server which almost exclusively had hungarians (I think). Most LFG's and Trade comments were in their language and some had "LFG X.. HUN ONLY".

It's a problem because many big "MMORPG countries" aren't very good at english. Russia & Poland are two major examples. Germany and France, well, there's a reason they get their own official servers in just about every mmorpg. Of course, this is just generalizations of my own 10+ years of mmorpg experiences.