Al-Khwarizmi 5 years ago

I don't think English will stop being EU's lingua franca any time soon. Agreeing on a replacement would be politically impossible (the Germans wouldn't accept French, the French wouldn't accept German, the Spanish would have good arguments to make in any of both cases); and having several languages in equal status would just be not practical (you cannot realistically expect every EU citizen to know their native language, French and German, for example).

A "neutral" language like Esperanto is a nice idea, and I would also like Latin as the EU language, as it can be argued to be the language that historically shaped Europe the most. But let's not fool ourselves, no one is going to stand for learning a new language from scratch (even if it's easy) when English pretty much Just Works(tm), and provides a lot of utility also outside the EU.

Personally, I'm from Spain and I'm not annoyed or upset about English being the lingua franca. I think we should abandon the idea of English "belonging" to its native speakers. When I talk to people from Germany, from China, or from Vietnam, for example our common language is almost always English, even if neither of us are natives. English is useful for us and belongs to us, as much as to someone from Gloucestershire.

  • achamayou 5 years ago

    French here, I absolutely agree. Specifically, American English would be preferable because it is what’s spoken widely outside Europe, and its spelling is somewhat more regular (as well as historically accurate!).

    I wonder to what extent coming up with a new name for it would help adoption.

    • Al-Khwarizmi 5 years ago

      I would be fine with American English, but I'm not sure one has to go to the trouble to specify an official dialect. In the written form, it's trivial to understand British English if you have learned American and vice versa. In the spoken form, it might be harder but this is something that commonly happens, even within monolingual countries.

    • alexgmcm 5 years ago

      The differences are trivial though?

      The main difference is the accent (when I was staying in California as an Englishman they couldn't understand me when I said "Kettle" and their pronunciation sounded more like "Keddle")

      But accents will always be an issue regardless of which language is chosen.

      I think they should continue using English as it's pragmatic but also introduce Esperanto as another working language and encourage its use (I used to speak Esperanto and my Grandfather is fluent so I'm a bit biased I suppose)

      • afiori 5 years ago

        Also the differences between American English and British English are significantly smaller than the difference between Italian English and French English or Chinese English.

    • liopleurodon 5 years ago

      Upvoted for American English

      The English tend to speak English better and have better grammar than Americans in my experience, but I do prefer American spelling (disclaimer: I'm American)

      • anoncake 5 years ago

        No. Like everyone else, Americans by definition speak their native language perfectly. There may very well be stylistic differences and you can aesthetically prefer a dialect, but native speakers do not commit grammatical errors.

        • afiori 5 years ago

          This is silly. It is like saying that native bipedal humans do not stumble when walking.

          There is a well recognized concept of mastering a language, you can claim (and I would agree) that dialects are respectable languages and AAVE is a proper English. Still some native speakers in any language cannot understand long sentences or know how to express complex information.

          Otherwise if we go with the truism "everyone speaks their native language perfectly" we simply end up essentially saying that languages are fragmented to the level of individuals and that some language are inherently "better" than others. Both are positions I would not like were they to become mainstream.

          • anoncake 5 years ago

            > This is silly. It is like saying that native bipedal humans do not stumble when walking.

            In linguistics, there is a difference between errors and mistakes. Making an ungrammatical utterance is only an error if it's because the speaker's model of the language is wrong, i.e. because it differs from the one of a native speaker. This cannot happen to an adult speaker, except maybe in pathological cases or to children. Mistakes, however, happen all the time and to everyone.

            > Still some native speakers in any language cannot understand long sentences or know how to express complex information.

            That is true. I thought it was clear that I was referring to native speakers' grammar when I replied to GP's claim that Americans have worse grammar.

            Not being able to understand certain sentences isn't something that only applies to "some" native speakers either:

            > A man that a woman that a child that a bird that I heard saw knows loves.

            Of course, a sentence like this is unacceptable[1] despite being grammatical.

            > Otherwise if we go with the truism "everyone speaks their native language perfectly" we simply end up essentially saying that languages are fragmented to the level of individuals

            I'm sorry to disappoint but that is the mainstream view. The language spoken by an individual is called an idiolect.

            > and that some language are inherently "better" than others.

            I can't follow. Why does the existence of idiolects imply that?

            [1] That's the technical term for an utterance humans can't parse (except of course "manually" by analyzing it). This example demonstrates center embeddings. The brain probably fails to parse it because its stack overflows.

        • DuskStar 5 years ago

          There are multiple dialects of english even within the US and many of them have different grammar rules.

  • born2discover 5 years ago

    and having several languages in equal status would just be not practical - Sorry but I have to disagree here. Look at UN, they have Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian and Spanish as official languages.

    Why is there an absolute must to only have one official language? Why not chose several most widely spoken ones, including English, and let each speaker chose the one that suits them best?

    I live in a country where we have 4 national languages and 3 official ones. Our members of parliament can express themselves in the language of their choosing and their speech/intervention is translated for the rest. That way people can express themselves in the language they are most comfortable in (that is often not English, unless it's their mother tongue) and that does not put older generations (who never learnt English) at a disadvantage.

    Having one single language in a multicultural setting can be tricky.

    • kstenerud 5 years ago

      Because having multiple official languages adds more layers of bureaucracy to everything and amounts to a colossal waste of time and money.

      We have this in Canada, and outside of Quebec, nobody cares about the French language. In fact, many manufacturers specifically avoid Canada in some cases due to the requirement to put both English and French on the packaging. All government communication has to be written twice. Government employees must have fluency in both languages.

      All that waste, and for what? A language that nobody else uses.

      • born2discover 5 years ago

        I live in Switzerland where everything you've mentioned has to be done thrice (3 official languages: French, German, Italian), yet I am firm in my belief that it should be maintained.

        It's not about whether anybody cares about a specific language anywhere outside of a province. It's about maintaining a language as one of the elements of the culture and country's identity.

        If only criterion to keep or strike a language as official one was whether it's spoken by a majority or a minority, then you'd be living in a dictatorship of the masses (where majority decides for everybody else).

        Learning a second or a third language is not a burden. It's an opportunity. An opportunity to immerse one self into a different culture, different world view... It should be seen as gift to widen one's perspective and not a financial burden.

        And using the money as an argument against this or that is a dangerous slippery slope. Because with the same argument one could argue against a lot of other things: "Why maintain a universal healthcare, it costs too much!", "What? Maintain free education? Who needs that, it costs too much!"... And so forth, and so forth.

        • kstenerud 5 years ago

          I do agree that multiple languages are a good thing in general. I speak English, French, and Japanese fluently, and am now learning German.

          However, I also believe that bureaucracy should be minimized, especially at the federal level. And when it actively impedes the flow of goods and services (as it does in Canada because it's such a small market), you're throwing away far more than you gain.

          • afiori 5 years ago

            EDIT: apparently I misunderstood the problem with Canada. This comment make less sense for this particular context. I still endorse the general point.

            having labels in a language people can understand is not bureaucracy. Bureaucracy would be having to compile every document in both languages.

            A problem with multiple national languages (I have small experience of this living on the border between Germany and France and medium-short permanence in Benelux) is that if you have to write everything in two/three languages there is no space left for English to accommodate tourists.

            On the other hand, if there is already an translation infrastructure it can maybe be adapted to one more language more easily....

      • barking 5 years ago

        You'd still expect manufacterers to put your language on packaging and for the government to communicate with you in it, I presume?

        • kstenerud 5 years ago

          Yes, but without the requirement to have two languages on the packaging, you can have one design for both Canada and the USA.

          Canada is a tiny market by comparison, so it's often not worth the expense of designing separate multi-language packaging just for them.

          • born2discover 5 years ago

            I would argue that there are smaller countries where packaging has to be in more than one language and companies that seek to enter that market are fine with it.

            If your only argument against doing business in a country because of the language requirements, you aren't a good businessman/woman. Because you are sacrificing a market share for something that can be easily done: translate once, print indefinitely.

            • kstenerud 5 years ago

              It's not just the words themselves; you need a completely different package design. It's not like in Europe where the package is mostly the same except for some language-specific section. In Canada, you need to translate EVERYTHING, including the slogan [1], and even the name in some cases. Every English sentence must be translated and presented in equal size in French.

              You can call it good/bad business practice all you want. Real manufacturers do make conscious decisions to avoid the Canadian market due to these costs. The reality is that we suffer because of this policy.

              There is one silver lining, however: Online retailers like Amazon seem to be exempt.

              [1] http://blog.generalmills.com/wp-content/uploads/Honey-Nut-Ch...

              • born2discover 5 years ago

                I see! Then I do understand why you'd be in favor of dropping French as it seems to me that Quebec might be doing a bit of a protectionism dance there.

                Where I live (Switzerland) the minimum to have is the information text translated (the one at the back). But the brand itself can remain as it is. Usually however, you do see a bit more translated, such as subtitles or things like what type of product that is, like "whole-grained bread" and things like that.

                Also we're lucky to be in the middle of Europe, so companies that export to France and Germany tend to create one double translated product for both countries and it's imported to Switzerland as well.

                But yea, if you force double work on the companies without any rational reason behind, then they might try to reduce costs by simply avoiding the market altogether.

      • afiori 5 years ago

        In benelux it is even more extreme, there must be German/Luxembourgish French and Flemish/Dutch. often there is no longer space for English :)

        Anyway globalization need to be respectful of local identities. It is one of the tenets of a multicultural society. By insisting that population leave behind their local languages you are either fragmenting countries or cooking up a dangerous backlash.

      • sys_64738 5 years ago

        Quebec is big is population and land size so saying 'nobody cares' is being disingenuous. It's an official language so can't be ignored.

    • onlydeadheroes 5 years ago

      Assuming nothing is lost in translation. Such a system is totally blind to this issue.

    • isolli 5 years ago

      Curious, what country is that?

      • ttoinou 5 years ago

        Switzerland ?

        • valb 5 years ago

          AFAIK Switzerland has 4 official languages

          • born2discover 5 years ago

            Yes, we have 4 national languages: French, German, Italian and Romansh. However only three of them bear the title of official language, that is, language used in official communications.

            Romansh is spoken only in one of our "provinces" (Canton Graubünden) thus is considered too tiny to be supported on the national scale for official purposes.

  • 0815test 5 years ago

    > Personally, I'm from Spain and I'm not annoyed or upset about English being the lingua franca. I think we should abandon the idea of English "belonging" to its native speakers. When I talk to people from Germany, from China, or from Vietnam, for example our common language is almost always English, even if neither of us are natives.

    Agreed. The EU should do the needful.

    • Uberphallus 5 years ago

      Have you passed out your English classes?

      • anoncake 5 years ago

        No, they demonstrated the official language of the future Indo-European Union.

        ("Do the needful" is Indian English)

  • 7952 5 years ago

    A few years ago I was in a group of people using English to talk. I was the only native speaker,and honestly had more trouble communicating as a result. I have a strong west country accent and people are not used to it. And there are lots of colloquialisms that you use without thinking about it.

  • barking 5 years ago

    I would also like Latin as the EU language

    It would be like deja veni vidi vici all over again.

    • nabla9 5 years ago

      Interlingua is artificial language where vocabulary is common to the widest possible range of western European languages. Many Europeans understand Interlingua without knowing it.

      Examples:

      Mi aeroglissator es plen de anguillas.

      Multo ben, gratias. E vos?

      Contente de facer vostre cognoscentia!

      Il es un placer facer vostre cognoscentia!

      Amarea vos dansar con me?

      Parla plus lentemente, per favor

      Patre nostre, qui es in le celos, que tu nomine sia sanctificate; que tu regno veni; que tu voluntate sia facite como in le celo, etiam super le terra.

      • barking 5 years ago

        I'd suspect that a monoglot german speaker would understand nothing of that. Even an english speaker and despite our huge borrowing from french it's not too easy.

        • anoncake 5 years ago

          Not a chance. I don't understand more of that than of any romance language.

          Speakers of romance languages probably feel the same way about Folkspraak:

          > All mensklik wesings âre boren frî on' gelîk in werđigheid on' rejte. Đê âre begifted mid ferstand on' gewitt on' skulde behandele êlkên in en gêst av brôđerhêd.

          Surprisingly, the language has been invented after the invention of keyboards with finite space for diacritics. In so far as it actually has been developed at all.

  • schuke 5 years ago

    With Brexit English has become even more neutral!

peteretep 5 years ago

> It will rid the French or the Germans of the temptation try to make their language the dominant one in the post-Brexit EU

It really won't, especially the French.

  • isolli 5 years ago

    It reminds me of this anecdote [0]: "Outraged by English, Chirac storms out of summit"

    > After a brief introduction in French, M. Seillière, the [French] president of the EU employers' federation, said he would speak in English because it was the international business language. Without saying a word, the French President left with the French foreign minister and finance minister. He only returned when the president of the European Central Bank, Jean-Claude Trichet, began speaking in French.

    https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/outraged-by-...

  • tluyben2 5 years ago

    Spain will fight tooth and nail as well. And Germany too. So no it really won't.

    • harperlee 5 years ago

      I’m from Spain, and it is surprising to hear someone say we will do that.

      We have a huge inferiority complex, and our own cainistic version of the black legend, that makes us revere anything foreign as better than the local version. We have petty fights re. official languages about whether traffic signs should read “A coruña” or “La coruña”; or whether the national news anchor should say “Gerona” or “Girona” when speaking in spanish. We have regional governments that push spanish out of their regions. We as a nation obsess over english; we dream of speaking it better, we make it sound cool in the ads. We mock our leaders for not speaking it properly.

      No one seriously pushes in a coordinated manner for spanish being used in the EU as seriously as the french or german do. At most, we aspire to be the proxy for latin america relationships.

      As soon as anyone proposes to use english, we will see it as the opportunity to not have half of europe speak in french.

    • inawarminister 5 years ago

      I'm curious about Spanish objection to English language. Sure, they do have the issue with Gibraltar and British "tourists" perenially, but is there any effect for the language itself?

      At least Spanish is spoken by an order of magnitude more people than German, though (Latin America, and nowadays a third of USA as well)

    • otikik 5 years ago

      Spain? What makes you say that?

    • anoncake 5 years ago

      > tooth and nail as well. And Germany too.

      Maybe. Definitely not to the extent France will.

    • dep_b 5 years ago

      > Spain will fight tooth and nail as well. And Germany too.

      Dubbing movies meant for an adult public doesn't automatically make you a nation of retards. And what the hell is Spain to you anyway? Are we speaking about people from Barcelona, Andorra, the center?

peteretep 5 years ago

> the rest of the EU will be freed of the British veto and able to get as integrated as it wishes

Anyone who thinks that EU skepticism is exclusive to the Brits is in for a nasty nasty surprise.

  • flexie 5 years ago

    I think that by now everyone realizes that there are EU skeptics in all member countries. There will always be.

    Around 25 percent of Americans want their state to secede (1). A lot of Italians want Northern Italy to part with Southern Italy. Spain has Catalan and Basque separatists. The UK has Scotland, and perhaps even Northern Ireland.

    There are many people in many places that think they would be better off in a more (formally) independent state.

    For now, the EU skeptics are a small minority in most EU countries. I for one hope it stays like that. The EU has shown remarkable unity when met with Brexit.

    1: http://blogs.reuters.com/jamesrgaines/2014/09/19/one-in-four...

    • jacquesm 5 years ago

      Once upon a time Amsterdam was at war with other cities. What those people do not realize is that the only alternative to further European integration is another war, the more and the smaller the slices are the more certain that future becomes. Just the UK seceding from the EU increases the chances of such a thing happening tremendously.

      • antientropic 5 years ago

        > the only alternative to further European integration is another war

        False dichotomy. Surely the same level of integration, or even a slightly lower level of integration, will not necessarily lead to war. EU members were already quite peaceful before the adoption of the Lisbon treaty, for instance.

        And you should also at least entertain the possibility that integrating populations further than they're willing to go increases the odds of conflict.

        • jacquesm 5 years ago

          The same level would be fine but it is either the top of the hill or the beginning of the downslope.

          The EU made several critical mistakes in the way they approached their growth and integration issues and those in turn could very well lead to a final desintegration or split of the bloc. The UK leaving is a very bad sign, given that they already had one of the most exceptional positions within the EU.

          Time will tell.

          Of course the integration 'by force' (Maastricht for one, Lisbon for another) was utterly dumb, it feels to me as though they thought 'now or never' not realizing that they may be planting the seeds for the eventual dismantling of the union.

  • sgift 5 years ago

    The British position was special for at least three reasons:

    - British state doctrine has always been: We are the empire, the natural rulers of the world. We only live by chance near the rest of Europe, so we have to interact with the continent at bit more

    - Britain was a net payer. We may strive for that to not be relevant, but if you pay you have influence

    - Britain got many exceptions to the usual rules that allowed them to further their position

    No other country has that combination, so the EU "skepticism" of others countries is less important, though there's still danger. We'll see how that plays out in the end, but still: GBs position was in many ways unique. Even if GB rejoined in a few years it probably wouldn't be the same.

    • Chris2048 5 years ago

      > Britain got many exceptions to the usual rules that allowed them to further their position

      Can you explain what you mean?

      • jddj 5 years ago

        I'm not GP, but the UK has negotiated four opt-outs (you could also include Cameron's pre-referendum requests). This is more than any other EU country.

        The economic and monetary union (the euro), Schengen, the Charter of Fundamental Rights and "the area of freedom, security and justice".

      • gumby 5 years ago

        The rebate is (was) the biggie.

      • 781 5 years ago

        Britain was allowed to not follow many EU laws, for example they were allowed to keep the pound and not join the Euro as the treaties mandate.

  • derriz 5 years ago

    Indeed but it's not just EU skepticism.

    Even among very pro-EU political parties and countries across Europe, there has been no appetite for a new EU treaty since the Lisbon treaty. I'm willing to bet that there will be no further EU treaties for a decade or more.

    And without a new treaty, there is little or no scope for further EU integration. The EU is a highly legalistic construct where powers are strictly defined by its multi-lateral treaties.

    The idea that the EU civil service (commission) can just grab powers from national governments is anti-EU fud. Even within areas judged to be within the competence of the EU, the principle of subsidiarity (that power should remain with national governments unless absolutely necessary) is explicity a general principle of EU law.

Jonnax 5 years ago

This doesn't really make sense. American English which they propose adopting is removes more of the European roots of words.

For example removing the 'U' from words like Colour.

Ireland is also an English speaking country in the EU.

And I don't know how much of the sentiment of "Let's Americanise!" Would be popular.

  • bitL 5 years ago

    You probably don't know that 'u' in colour is a more recent British development than the standard US English is based on. US English is more original than the current British one.

    • ctz 5 years ago

      You misrepresent the timeline, though. Webster popularised the simplifications in US English in 1828. But this was about six hundred years after colour was borrowed into English from French, not the Latin "color" that Webster preferred.

    • foldr 5 years ago

      No, getting rid of the ’u' was Webster's idea. But standardized spelling is such a recent phenomenon that there's probably no definitive fact of the matter as to which spelling is 'original'.

  • s_dev 5 years ago

    I'd be in favor of Hiberno English being adopted. It's not much different to other forms of English and wouldn't allude to the EU being "Americanized" or further flatter a country leaving the EU on acrimoious terms.

  • Svip 5 years ago

    What confuses me most is the why chose American English? Considering that British English is already a working language of the EU, why go for a new one? That's just going to mean more work. If you are going to promote efficiency, a continuation of what we already have (that works) should be the goal, not open a whole other can of worms.

  • jobigoud 5 years ago

    Don't you mean "let's Americanize"?

kayoone 5 years ago

Living in working in the Berlin tech world, English is already the official working language in most companies. Even as I german i have no problem with this, my only gripe is that it makes it very hard for my non-german colleagues to learn german.

  • Majestic121 5 years ago

    I have the same issue in Paris, I know some coworkers who have been living in France for more than 8 years, and still can't speak a reasonable French : barely able to order at a restaurant for exemple, definitely not able to hold a conversation.

    I'm not sure it is actually an issue, it just feels weird as a French person to discover that French is not even required in your own country.

    • jacquesm 5 years ago

      > it just feels weird as a French person to discover that French is not even required in your own country.

      And why should it be? In big cities people tend to be more adaptive towards this than outside. If you go outside to the country side the situation will rapidly change.

      But in every major European capital it is most likely possible to get around on just English.

      I always make an effort when in France, Germany and Poland to speak the local language but more often than not the locals speak English much better than I speak their language and after a sentence or two the switch is made. Of course making an effort is appreciated anyway but there definitely is no expectation of being able to hold a full conversation in the language of the place you visit.

      • Majestic121 5 years ago

        I agree for a place of visit, and I do the same when I can, but for a place to live in, that's a different beast.

        Again, I'm not saying this is a bad thing, but this realisation was quite surprising to me

      • afiori 5 years ago

        Because if you live in a country for 8 years you are bound to encounter limits in where English can support you. Police, hospitals, local doctors, local elections, bureaucracy, food label and shops, information notice and warnings, verbose street sign for road works and many more.

        • jacquesm 5 years ago

          Doctors police and just about everybody else here speaks English, street signs are unified across the EU, road works you might get stumped but many navigators will deal with that just fine.

          A friend of mine has lived in NL for 3 decades now and still does not speak Dutch, I'm sure he's an exception but he does not seem in any way hindered by this particular inability.

  • 7952 5 years ago

    Why exactly is this? Are there really that many non Germans speakers that you need to use English? And would you use English to have a chat at the water cooler, or down the pub (or locally relevant alternative).

    • taejo 5 years ago

      > Are there really that many non Germans speakers that you need to use English?

      I'm not OP, but also at a Berlin tech company. I always say I'm glad I learned German (in a much smaller city elsewhere in Germany) before moving here. You absolutely can learn German here, and I know people who have, but I also know people who've lived here for years and don't know enough to buy a loaf of bread in a bakery. The problem is that you can get away with it: your colleagues can all speak English (and some of them can't speak Germany, in some workplaces, including mine); as an expat, you probably live in a neighborhood with lots of other expats, where the staff in restaurants and shops speak English (and it's not uncommon for waiters to be unable to speak German); you can make your friends exclusively in expat communities, and if you arrive in Berlin speaking no German, that's a lot easier than integrating into the local community without yet knowing its language. It's especially bad if your accent gives away that English is your native language.

    • kayoone 5 years ago

      In my company and many others, germans are actually in the minority, at least in product and tech. Talent shortage lets companies bring a lot of people from all over the world and English is the lowest common denominator. We have many more people from South America, India, Africa and other parts of Europe than germans in a team of 100+ people. Many restaurants/cafes/bars have non-german staff so in many areas it does not really feel like being in Germany. Personally I love the diversity though.

      Watercooler talk is usually english unless I am around a group of people where I know that they all speak good german, but that rarely happens tbh. It's more likely to hear another group talking portuguese, spanish or arabic :)

    • pry86 5 years ago

      Germany needs qualified and cheap employees. A lot. Therefore especially in tech there is lot's of companies where most of the workers are foreigners. So they have to speak in English. Otherwise nobody would come :D

      It sucks, because it's harder to learn German, because you don't use it on daily basis. Myself including. But I find it ridiculous that some people after many years are not able to handle A1. Come on.

rofo1 5 years ago

The language of our time is English. There's just no disputing that. You can argue that it's because US won the cold war, and then indoctrinated the world via music and movies, and so on, and so on, but it doesn't change that fact.

We should adopt English and move on; majority of people know it and study it. Why regress?

The point of using a language in the first place is to understand each other.

Everyone learning a new language that will just substitute English would be an immense waste of time.

  • louthy 5 years ago

    > You can argue that it's because US won the cold war, and then indoctrinated the world

    Seems odd, surely you could argue it was because of British imperialism (which also brought English to the US)? The British empire once covered 1/3 of the globe, it seems far more likely a cause.

    • felxh 5 years ago

      It is a bit paradoxical of course, since, as you pointed out, the British empire is the reason that the US speaks english. However, I would still argue that the US is really the reason English became widely spoken in Europe.

      The British Empire dominated large parts of the world, but it never dominated continental Europe. English was not widely spoken or taught in Europe until the end of WW2, when American culture became highly influential (although the UK did have its part through pop music).

      The final push for English came with the internet and thus again from the US, I think. In many European countries there is a big divide in terms of English proficiency between people who grew up in pre or post internet era.

    • bhaak 5 years ago

      > Seems odd, surely you could argue it was because of British imperialism (which also brought English to the US)? The British empire once covered 1/3 of the globe, it seems far more likely a cause.

      If this were the reason, then English should already have been the lingua franca in 1900. But it wasn't.

      But the previous spreading of the English language by the English Empire certainly helped when the US emerged as one of the main beneficiary of WW2.

    • r_singh 5 years ago

      It's true for India, British missionary schools popularised English (or should I say British English) in India on a large scale.

    • rofo1 5 years ago

      British empire was (almost) 1/4 - it was never close to 1/3 of the world.

      Even at its peak, English language wasn't as widespread as now. The French language was, especially in 18th and 19th century, having substituted Latin.

      After WW2, US absolutely dominated the world coming off as the only victor in WW2 (that's my personal opinion) and used their position to place English language as #1 language of the world (over time), undisputed. The end of the cold war cemented this even further.

      We can argue that British imperialism helped somewhat, that I agree with.

      • gumby 5 years ago

        > The French language was, especially in 18th and 19th century, having substituted Latin.

        Hence the use of the Latin term “lingua franca”

        • derriz 5 years ago

          Not exactly - "Lingua Franca" was originally a trading argot/pidgen used by mediterranean traders with more of an Italian basis. Later it came to mean a generic term for "common language". Only centuries later did French became a lingua franca for European diplomacy.

          * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lingua_franca

      • rocqua 5 years ago

        > and used their position to place English language as #1 language of the world

        I doubt it was intentional. Seems like it was a nice side-effect at most.

        • rofo1 5 years ago

          Why do they call it cold war, what do you think? They had wars either through proxy or through propaganda (aka. "culture"). Movies, music and books were big part of that war. Billions and billions went into the production and placement of them.

          If that doesn't show intent, then I don't know what would :)

          Don't get me wrong, I am actually impressed by it and gotta hand it to Reagan - winning a war without even firing a single shot.

          Edit: I don't want to downplay the factor of oil and, but I feel like it's off topic here so that's why I don't mention it.

          • usrusr 5 years ago

            Hitchcock, almost the entirety of pre-hiphop popular music, a very big chunk of the "cultural pressure" behind the success of the English language did not come from America but from a small island nation that lost WW2 in all but name. American cultural influence is wildly overrated.

  • s_dev 5 years ago

    It's vital small languages are preserved and that the world doesn't become monolingual. Communication is a funny word -- we often mean it to commuincate with others but often we communicate with ourselves in the present -- and to our furture selves -- e.g. code comments are often for your future self as well as other programmers.

    People who speak different lanaguges litteraly "think differently" and diversity of thought is absolutely essential to humanity progressing.

    It's been positied that "Asians are better at math" because their languages have a more logical naming system for numbers giving many a small early advantage that accumulates over time. Other languges possess other attributes that impart such advantages or disadvanges giving us diversity of thought so that we can have new ideas about things and new perspectives.

    • r3bl 5 years ago

      We could all cherish and love our own native languages internally while relying on English abroad (and online). Those things aren't mutually exclusive.

      • s_dev 5 years ago

        What I'm saying is it's better that "some" people don't know English. I don't know what number constitutes or what % of people but by having some people -- for lack of a better word -- "corrupted" by English will have new perspectives. We need lots of languages and lots of combinations of these languages for a healthy world.

        I say this as a monoglot English speaker. I have some French and Irish but both are very poor.

        • Isinlor 5 years ago

          Languages drift apart, split and evolve. Even if by magic wand the whole world would start speaking perfect English now, in 100-200 years we will most likely have numerous versions of English. Each version would evolve depending on different enclaves of people around the world.

      • usrusr 5 years ago

        If I had a choice between being better at English and being better at my native language, I'd chose the latter. Realistically though it would be much easier to become less bad at a second language (lot's of low hanging fruit left) than to go from regular to exceptional in you mother tongue.

    • phiresky 5 years ago

      > People who speak different lanaguges litteraly "think differently"

      This widely held belief is absolutely not a proven fact. It's called linguistic relativity or linguistic determinism [1] and the strong form (language determines thought) has not been taken seriously by researchers in the field for a while.

      The weak form (language can have somewhat of an impact on the way you think) has not been proven or disproven and is a topic of debate. You just state it as if it was known, even though the causal relationship of most examples you could name can easily be the other way around (culture / thinking affects how a language develops).

      I'd argue that everyone learning and speaking the same language would have immense benefits for a global society. You can keep recordings in museums and linguistic researchers to keep a historical record of languages, just like we have for other tools and methods that we no longer have any use for.

      [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity

    • tjansen 5 years ago

      People speaking different languages may think different, but most of their thoughts are lost because they can't be easily translated to English. Countries like Germany and France used to have global cultural impact, but today they are almost irrelevant because their work is not easily translatable into English. When was the last time a German or French book, or movie, or song was globally relevant? How many globally relevant works did the comparatively-sized UK publish in the same time?

    • etaioinshrdlu 5 years ago

      That's a fine opinion to have but I happen to have the opposite opinion. A thought has the same meaning in any language. And we actually waste energy in translation and slow humanities' progress with language barriers. I really do wish we all spoke the same language. I feel like I gain nothing by not being able to communicate effectively with some subset of people.

      This is obviously not a very popular opinion of mine...

      • s_dev 5 years ago

        >I really do wish we all spoke the same language.

        Just contemplate how if someone suggested all computer languges should be just become C because things would be easier.

        It's even more important that we have diversity for natual languages imo -- after all onece you've a Turing Complete language one is the same as the next but we know how silly and inconvenient that would really be.

        • etaioinshrdlu 5 years ago

          I'll bite.

          Computer languages are more about building a machine than communicating a human idea. Human languages are more about human things. We're all human and therefore should speak the same language.

          Computer languages are sometimes so similar and help you build a similar type of machine. Think of ruby, JS, python, etc. All work very similar internally. I really wish we could pick one language (in a particular domain, say scripting) and have a monoculture. It saddens me when libraries need to be rewritten N times. I don't think there's anything silly about it. Web browsers could have picked python instead of JS, Rails could have picked python, and we would have been better off for it.

          It's just a silly accident of history that we have what we have today.

          • etaioinshrdlu 5 years ago

            Think about hiring a team of people for you next programming project. They each speak a different language and none can communicate effectively. Doesn't sound so good to me.

    • born2discover 5 years ago

      This! Diversity of thought is what separates us from mere robots. It what makes us non-linear and should be preserved!

  • isolli 5 years ago

    English has the advantage of being an easy language to learn (at least up to 80% proficiency): no genders, little conjugation, no declension.

    • rusk 5 years ago

      The fact that it has so lany dialects that are frequently explored in popular media too means its a language that can be spoken poorly and still be understood. The listener bears some of the cognitive load and many other languages arent as advanced in this regard.

      • Thimothy 5 years ago

        "can be spoken poorly and still be understood"

        That is only something that is easy for native speakers, though. The points a non-native speaker anchors in the speaking flow are completely different to the ones a native speaker does, and depend on the mother language, making the thousand "official" variations of native English quite a challenge.

        I find far superior other languages approach of having a "high" form taught in schools that everybody native is supposed the speak and understand, and the dialects are left for home.

    • giomasce 5 years ago

      Yes, but it has the big disadvantage of a very irregular pronunciation. Other languages, like many southern European ones, seem to me to have much easier pronunciation. I am biased because I am Italian, but I am pretty sure that it is much easier for an Englishman with basically no Italian training to speak relatively correctly an Italian sentence than it is for me, after many years of studying and practising English, to properly pronounce English.

      I would like this EU English to evolve in the direction of keeping a simple grammar and going towards a more regular pronunciation. Basically it would become a new form of Esperanto, except that differently from Esperanto it would actually have a viable path for many people to learn it.

      I know I like to dream, but maybe...

  • usrusr 5 years ago

    > The language of our time is English.

    I take that as a powerful argument against granting it any official preference: English is doing fine with or without being forced upon anybody. That would just provoke organized resistance.

  • born2discover 5 years ago

    While English might be the language of "our time", I wonder for how long? With China's expansion and their almost 2.5 billion of people speaking Mandarin, I am wondering whether in the next 20 years we'd see a shift towards people learning Mandarin instead of English.

    "We should adopt English and move on; majority of people know it and study it. Why regress?" - Sorry but I have to disagree here. While I think it is important to study English, I am not convinced it would be a great idea to abandon other languages in favor of it. Languages are part of a culture and it's traditions. Abandoning the language might lead to a progressive death of certain cultural aspects of one's identity and that wouldn't be progress, imho, that would be the exact opposite.

    • mdhen 5 years ago

      Due to not having an alphabet and being tonal I highly doubt Mandarin is ever going to be the lingua Franca. It's just too hard for non native speakers to learn.

      • jacquesm 5 years ago

        That's a drawback when you're catching up but an advantage when you are ahead!

    • yorwba 5 years ago

      > almost 2.5 billion of people speaking Mandarin

      Where are you getting that number? Ethnologue [1] claims 1.1B speakers, 1B of which live in China, 0.9B being native speakers.

      [1] http://www.ethnologue.com/21/language/cmn/

      • born2discover 5 years ago

        Unfortunately it was from the top of my head, and I should have checked beforehand. Thanks for correcting me!

  • kowdermeister 5 years ago

    > The language of our time is English.

    And tomorrows language is mandarin. Let's not write off that 1.1B speakers. With the rate China is expanding its influence in the world, I wouldn't be surprised if in 100 years not speaking mandarin wouldn't look a bit odd.

    • jonathanstrange 5 years ago

      There are many reasons why Mandarin will not become the next lingua franca, most importantly the writing system which unifies China but is even hard for Chinese to learn. As it looks now, it seems more likely that more and more Chinese will become fluent in English and that some English - possibly including a lot of Chinese loannwords - will be the most widespread language in the 100 years from now.

      But I think you were downvoted for the wrong reasons, since otherwise the argument is fairly sound. Chinese influence is continually increasing world-wide. It's mainly the writing system that prevents a wider spreading of Mandarin, and the Chinese cannot give it up because it unifies their nation. Another possible scenario is that other languages of China die out even more quickly than they already do now, thus paving the way to full mutual comprehensibility via Mandarin, which would then allow a drastic reform of the writing system. However, this seems unlikely to occur within the next 100 years.

    • mxcrossb 5 years ago

      If you really want to troll, try recommending Arabic as the language of Europe’s future ;)

      • faissaloo 5 years ago

        Well if EU English becomes a thing what'll probably happen is a mix of North African Arabic dialects and EU English, my family and I speak a mix of Algerian, British English, American English and French French

      • jacquesm 5 years ago

        I don't think it is a troll at all. The Chinese are ascendant and Europe / The West is clearly shooting itself in the foot at every chance we get. Given another 100 years the GGPs vision might come true. Of course that's a long time and all kinds of change could happen but it isn't out of the realm of the possible, and far more likely than many other candidates.

        The big change point to me would be if leading scientific publications would start to be in Chinese rather than English and the Chinese language would give access to unique knowledge. To some extent this is already true but it is not debilitating yet. Once that happens though studying Chinese to keep up with scientific development would be about as important as studying English is for scientists today. Maybe English already has a lock-in on this but I'm not sure.

  • Creationer 5 years ago

    For adults it is easy to move across the EU: you can work and socialise using in English.

    But for children, and families, it is impossible. How can a child move and be expected to learn a new language immediately?

    This seems like a huge disconnect. National governments need to start to offer (for parents that opt-in) primary and secondary education in English, with the entire curriculum and exams in that language as well.

    Universities degrees are already offered in English, and at the very least fluency in the language is required to study most courses, since all of the articles, case studies and reference materials are in that language. It is time that that same flexibility was extended to the earlier years of education.

    • jacquesm 5 years ago

      > How can a child move and be expected to learn a new language immediately?

      I've seen children do this repeatedly and without any issue whatsoever, it is the adults that struggle.

    • geekpowa 5 years ago

      Renato Constantino, Filipino historian, argues persuasively that children should be educated in their natal tongue. Largely a political essay, also discusses language issues like a child having to learn a language not spoken in the home before they can begin to learn.

      https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/7735/865e2ea8fd8d9662f3916f...

      • jacquesm 5 years ago

        Education strives to transfer the knowledge and experience of those that have gone before to the next generation, so they don't have to start from scratch. As such, it is usually more efficient to do that in the language the recipient understands best, their natal tongue. But over the longer timespan of a human life being limited to your natal tongue will also severely reduce the amount of knowledge and wisdom that you have access to. Most countries address this by giving children in school compulsory lessons in other languages once they reach a certain minimum age. Children from multi-lingual homes have a distinct advantage here, their concepts are already mapped to multiple representations and they do not need to first translate what they want to say or hear into their mother language.

    • barking 5 years ago

      Sounds like a dystopian future to me.

      • jobigoud 5 years ago

        A dystopia where every human can speak to any other?

        Imagine it was the other way around. There is a single language humans speak and someone suggests we should instead split in hundreds of non mutually intelligible ones. Why would any one want that?

        • barking 5 years ago

          Because it's more interesting I think. Like I find europe more interesting than USA because the cultures are more varied and a big reason for that is the language variation. Sadly we are becoming more homogenised already. Dialects are disappearing and it's becoming possible to speak English everwhere as well as to dine in MacDonalds.

    • chmod775 5 years ago

      > National governments need to start to offer (for parents that opt-in) primary and secondary education in English, with the entire curriculum and exams in that language as well.

      This already exists in many places. European countries are used to offering education in multiple languages. Multilingual schools or schools teaching in something other than the local language have existed for hundreds of years.

  • NotPaidToPost 5 years ago

    > We should adopt English and move on; majority of people know it and study it. Why regress?

    It's extremely offensive to suggest that English is progress and other languages are a 'regression'.

    • Majestic121 5 years ago

      I think the progress part is about having a common language, not about this common language being English. If the common language was wolof, people moving back to their own (Spanish, French, German, whatever) would be regression, as now a discussion between French, Spanish and German people would be much much harder to have.

      • NotPaidToPost 5 years ago

        Well, the wording is rather clear that it was about English.

        Note that the author stealthily added a precision to his comment (which originally ended at "why regress?") since then to make clear it was about having a common language. But he has not removed the offending part.

        • jobigoud 5 years ago

          Adopting another language as our lingua franca when English is already filling that role would be a regression. It's not saying other languages are inferior per se, they might be superior. But using any other would be an inferior choice now. It doesn't mean we can't add local flavors to it.

          I am a French native speaker and I also think we should just use English and move on as a species. Interpersonnal communication is hard enough that we don't need artificial complications. Let's tackle more interesting problems. Same reason we should use a single measurement units system, mains current standard, a single currency, etc.

          • NotPaidToPost 5 years ago

            'move on as a species'? How arrogant and offensive is that? Basically a cultural genocide.

            A language carries with it a whole culture and history. Diversity enriches everyone.

  • tannhaeuser 5 years ago

    English is only the smallest common denominator really, and it hurts to hear Germans speak English imprecisely, stereotypically, or plain incorrectly. I'm far from being a language nationalist or something, but I think the EU (parliament, comission) should take the opportunity to move away from English, and begin to speak and publish in the "Common Tongue" (German, French, etc.) instead.

    • flohofwoe 5 years ago

      The current "common tongue" of the world and the EU is English. It might be a hardly recognizable pidgin dialect and very different from the posh Upper Class English spoken in London, but there's nothing wrong with that.

    • anoncake 5 years ago

      But is hearing Frenchpeople speak German really much of an improvement? At least everyone's English is about equally broken.

      • tannhaeuser 5 years ago

        There's just too much nuance lost. French has very particular words for concepts of state philosophy, politics, and law, and so has German (eg. yesterday's result saw the Green party's uprising, with their somewhat gender-mainstreamed and weaseled, but in any case special language), and other European languages as well I guess. English could be easily seen as the language of eg. finance-dominated Eurocracy, so using plain language also helps in not portraying EU institutions as "slaves to an international capitalist elite" or something, and give arguments to radical parties.

        • jacquesm 5 years ago

          That's exactly why English is such a success. By losing nuance in the words but making up for it in the sentences the language becomes a lot easier to learn.

          I'd much rather have the common language of the EU be English even without an English representation in the EU than to have to parse EU legal documents in French or German. The occasional contract is bad enough. At least with English there is a level playing field.

          • tannhaeuser 5 years ago

            But a major practical concern is that after Brexit the EU doesn't have Common Law countries left (except maybe Ireland and Malta, but I don't know really). For law and contract texts, Code Civil (Napoleonic Law) will be even more prevalent than before. So I can't see a good reason to stick to English which is simply an awkward language for expressing continental civil law concepts when there's a very large body of law and court language use in the respective native language.

            • jacquesm 5 years ago

              I really can't follow your argument. The EU laws are brand new and not usually connected to the civil code of the countries of the EU, who all have their own take on a lot of stuff. Case in point: the GDPR. The English text is used as the reference by the various countries that have now implemented it, there are translations but anything before the EU courts will most likely be conducted in English and use the English text. Regardless, those texts can be translated and nothing stops a country that is worried about its citizenry being unable to read the text to translate it.

              I don't see any major influence of either common law or the Napoleonic civil code on the EU legislation, though the court process arguably has been influenced strongly by those principles.

              • anoncake 5 years ago

                > The English text is used as the reference by the various countries that have now implemented it,

                Is it? All EU laws are published in the official languages of all members. Legally, there are no translations but 22 texts that have equal status and the same meaning.

                Don't ask me what happens if the meanings turn out not to match exactly in a relevant way.

                • jacquesm 5 years ago

                  Has there been a case before the EU high court yet where there was a meaningful discrepancy between a local version and another that was deemed to be leading?

                  • anoncake 5 years ago

                    I've found an interesting text by the legal service of the European Commission that answers that question.

                    TLDR: That's why the EUCJ primarily relies on the intent of a law.

                    http://ec.europa.eu/dgs/legal_service/seminars/agjacobs_summ... ("How to interpret legislation which is equally authentic in twenty languages")

                    • jacquesm 5 years ago

                      Thank you for digging that up! This also explains a couple of other things that I was wondering about.

Svip 5 years ago

I'm sorry, but this opinion piece sounds pretty dumb. It almost reads like a troll post. The fact that so many in this comment thread seems to be concurring with its suggestion is troubling enough.

If you really want to alienate the EU from the average EU citizen, make English its official language. And adopt a version only a tiny minority really speaks too, just to salt the wound! I'm not sure whether to be scared or laugh.

The fact that the EU has 24 official languages isn't meant to make its proceedings cumbersome or to necessarily facilitate national pride (although, it's certainly also that!), but to make it available to the general public. The official nature of all the member states' languages means you can submit documents in all those languages.

Everyone on Hacker News speak English, but it's not a majority in the EU who speaks or understands English comfortably. But it's easy to forget our privilege. Even as younger generations get more and more accustomed to learning, reading and speaking English around Europe, most are still more comfortable reading technical, political and legal texts in their own language.

They may understand the dialogue in Game of Thrones well enough, but can an Estonian farmer understand an EU agriculture subsidy determination, if it was written in English?

  • tannhaeuser 5 years ago

    Absolutely, and the EU was founded on principles of federation and preserving cultural heritage and differences. Most definitely the EU hasn't given power to sacrifice even a single language for the convenience of EU institutions and nobody in the EUP/EUC wants to change that in the slightest.

  • bryal 5 years ago

    > Everyone on Hacker News speak English, but it's not a majority in the EU who speaks or understands English comfortably.

    But a majority is comfortable with German or French?

    Also, I can promise you that at least for Sweden, a vast majority of population would prefer English being the official language of the EU to something like French. We may not always be completely comfortable speaking English, but it's a language just about anyone will understand with a little effort.

    • Svip 5 years ago

      I am not arguing for another language than English, but rather to maintain the status quo and keep all 24 languages official. Including English, even if no member state technically provides it. Which is probably what is going to happen anyway, Brexit or no Brexit.

k_bx 5 years ago

Great idea, and I'd be more interested in EU English Locale. I'm Ukrainian, and whenever I choose to have an English UI, I have a problem because U.S. and GB are using a non-metric system. Canadian locale works, but it would be nice to just have a common EU English one.

UPDATE: just checked, Ubuntu's United Kingdom uses Metric system actually, no idea why was I thinking it'd be Imperial before.

  • rlkf 5 years ago

    Try the Irish one; it is mostly sane, apart from not having dates in ISO format.

    • k_bx 5 years ago

      Thanks! Also, just checked, Ubuntu's United Kingdom locale uses Metric system actually, no idea why was I thinking it'd be Imperial before.

rwmj 5 years ago

What problem is this trying to solve? Is it the cost of language interpreters? That will probably soon be solved by technology. Is it the lack of a "demos"? That would only be solved if everyone in the European demos also learned English and all local politicians only spoke English, which is, ahem, unlikely to happen ever.

  • Creationer 5 years ago

    The point is that English is the de-facto single working language of the EU, and the de-facto business and scientific language of Europe, and so it might as well be made official.

    If countries offered Government services including education in English, it would hugely assist the movement of people and capital throughout the continent.

    Consider: you are from Spain, and have been offered a job at a great company in Germany. You will speak English at the office and probably get around the city speaking English. But: your children need to learn German, fluently and immediately, in order to continue their schooling?

    An official EU English would help pave the way for National Governments to offer services in both the local language and English.

    • yorwba 5 years ago

      There's nothing stopping national governments from offering services in English right now. For example, https://www.nelson-mandela-schule.net/ is a bilingual (German and English) public school in Berlin, where you could send your kids, assuming they speak English well enough.

      If on the other hand you want all services to be available in English everywhere, then I don't think that's a realistic expectation, since it would require all public-facing government employees to speak decent English.

  • swongel 5 years ago

    As an EU citizen, language is more than just translation. Free interpreters like Google Translate are very useful but will never be a substitute for learning a foreign language.

    Because you're not only learning the language you study, but also the culture, norms, and values of the people speaking the language. One might be able to translate "Gezellig" (Dutch, cozy) of "Fika" (Swedish, afternoon tea) into English, but context and understanding will be lost in the process unless the English listener knows these distinctive words and their meaning within the cultural context.

    Dutch and Swedish are still closely related to English by language as well as culture, imagine languages with no relation to English whatsoever; this "lost-in-translation" effect will be more pronounced.

    A future universal translator might be incredibly good at translating, but will never be a substitute for human cultural understanding without having to explain every caveat and cultural intricacies to the user.

    By all learning English, we can have a shared language, we're all able to understand each other in real-time, without technology, with less cultural ambiguity when interpreting.

    And why wouldn't we learn English? Learning a second language is very achievable when you're taught in school as a child, and Engish seems like a good compromise between Romance languages and Germanic languages since English has a shared vocabulary with both.

    Finally, I'm of course biased towards learning English, coming from a country where English is a mandatory subject in school. That being said; I assure you that no matter how good the translator; Seinfeld sucks in German.

  • pvaldes 5 years ago

    > What problem is this trying to solve?

    Being able to classify europeans in first class (allowed to work), and second class EU citizens (PIGs, yellow jackets,... etc), probably.

nnq 5 years ago

This is brilliant! Finally there's the opportunity to adopt an equalizing language that will also help free us from national culture isolationism:

- a language that is nobody's mother tongue: YEEEY!

- language that is not attached to any one culture: 10x YEEY!

Think about it! This could help global not just European unity: all the people of Asian and African origin who already speak fluent English could instantly embrace and join in and start building the new pan-European culture that will grow into a new and rich global culture. Freed from the tyranny of national-language-culture, this could be the first truly global culture Humanity has the chance to produce!

One thing Globalism 1.0 did wrong was trying to destroy culture. We know now that this leaves a void that attracts trash like racism, xenophobia and isolationism to get filled by these - culture too abhors vacuum! Now Globalism 2.0 can start right in the EU by constructing a new culture around a language that is nobody's own, at least on the cultural front. If this would ever work it will coagulate around it a new literature, then media etc. And finally we'd have a non-trash global culture that will be able to keep us united enough to properly address global issues like pollution and climate change!

</dream>

  • Thimothy 5 years ago

    The part I like best about your utopia is the irony that it leaves all native english countries out by design.

    "Thanks for giving us this tongue that has allowed us to transcend as humans, now GTFO"

    • nnq 5 years ago

      Anglo-american culture did enough appropriation itself... no reason to feel bad for appropriating its language :P

      (Though, tbh, "international high-English" as spoken has a very latin vocabulary, with non-native-English speakers often choosing the latin variant of words instead of the "native UK/US" phrasal verbs and such, eg. "we're accelerating" instead of "we're speeding up" or "we're gaining up speed", "inadequate" instead of "unfit", "superfluous" instead of "useless" etc. Not sure if to love or hate it, mostly loving myself it I think, but it's interesting and sort of contributes to more precise/explicit communication.)

  • pjc50 5 years ago

    > One thing Globalism 1.0 did wrong was trying to destroy culture

    Could you expand on this, I'm not sure what you're referring to?

    • nnq 5 years ago

      ...well, destroy is too harsh a world, but the "uniformization" process of global brands has not really created any authentic "strong culture". Also in trying too be maybe too politically correct and not to offend anyone, any "globally marketed" idea always ended up washed up.

      You need to CREATE ideas/stuff etc., and be occasionally violent/offensive with them (just be sure to offend everyone), otherwise unifomization and standardization will just destroy whatever is there to start with by diluting it out of existence.

      The "globalism destroys culture" is a fav meme of the "other side" now, but it's not without base! If you pour water into wine, or if you mix all wines in equal proportions, you basically "destroy" wine. What you want is an authentically new kind of wine! And you can only build this on some neutral / owned-by-nobody foundation, otherwise everyone will want "wine 2.0" to be their style of wine, and you'll end up with some "designed by democratic committee" crap, instead of something designed by individual creative geniuses competing among themselves and building on top of this new neutral foundation.

tluyben2 5 years ago

Pick a language, any language, but adopt it as official. It won't happen though. Germany, France, Spain, Italy and even Belgium are all way too proud. I am, for instance, a big fan of the Flemish language and the German language, but it is just not practical to keep them if you want to promote a united EU. But being Dutch I am for cooperation/trade; many people do not think like that and think their language and ways are vastly superior and should be adopted instead.

  • lucb1e 5 years ago

    Fellow Dutch speaker here. Why in the world are you a big fan of our language? Just because it's your own? And German, just because it's so close? Both languages are horrible to learn compared to English.

    • tluyben2 5 years ago

      I am a fan because I like them in a literary sense. I enjoy reading Flemish writers (Hubert Lampo, Hugo Raes) and German writers; I like the way sentences are built up and how they sound. I like Dutch less than Flemish, especially A.B.N. I find quite horrible these days. We bastardized our language too much in my opinion and our Belgian neighbors have always tried to prevent that.

      But my point was (typing on mobile so maybe I skipped a beat there) that although I like these languages, I think they are indeed impractical and we should just adopt English or Mandarin.

      Edit: also, where does that statement 'horrible to learn' come from? Honest question; I'm not sure how it works; not trolling here. We (the Dutch) are quite lenient with languages and I know why I am anyway; my German is as good as my English and my French and it did not take much effort learning these. I was not a very smart or particularly hard working student but when I grew up there was UK television, German television (the best of the bunch), Dutch television, Belgian television (was very good and original compared to Dutch tv as well, and with shows like Undercover very much back in the game) and French television; I learned most of my practical languages from watching scifi and horror when I was a kid.

      • lucb1e 5 years ago

        > where does that statement 'horrible to learn' come from?

        I had French, English, German, and Dutch in school. I'm a native Dutch speaker. English was easier than any other language. I'm pretty sure my English grammar is better than my Dutch right now. I mostly understand the d/t rules in Dutch by now, but I'm not always certain. French, German, and Dutch classes kept introducing lots of random rules that serve no purpose. At the end of high school, the only language I could hold a grammatically correct conversation in was English and my native language, and write a grammatically correct text only in English (not Dutch, or at least not without avoiding certain rules by rewriting sentences).

        English classes also introduced some silly random rules at first, but once you get beyond the a/an, learn a hundred or so irregular verbs, and a few other such things, you're mostly done and it's just vocabulary and expressions/sayings left. You can't really get around the latter, but the former can be kept as small as possible (only the useful features like indicating possessiveness or plurals, not differentiating between whether the object you're speaking about is {male, female, neuter} × {active, idle, giving, modifier}). And the German sentence structure is more convoluted than necessary (I forgot most of my French, maybe theirs too), plac[1] the second part of a split verb so far at the end of the sentence with lots of words and qualifications in between that you lost track of what came before when you finally reach the end of the sentence especially if you can't really read German fluently [1]ing, but maybe that just takes some getting used to.

    • Oreb 5 years ago

      I've never tried to learn Dutch, but I found German _much_ easier to learn than English. The German grammar and spelling are so regular, consistent and simple compared to English.

      • Thimothy 5 years ago

        The genres, though... And saying that the German grammar is simpler is quite a stretch. English barely conjugates verbs!

        Would trade putting genres into english if I could also get the German consistency in spelling any day, though.

  • NotPaidToPost 5 years ago

    咱们都应该说中文。

    • tluyben2 5 years ago

      I do not disagree, but that will not happen :] Even English won't happen before I die, and that would not be a hard switch.

acd 5 years ago

Adopting English as the main working language would save a lot of costs in EU from translations. Also one could have German, French and Spanish as side languages. The smaller EU countries will have to accept English as main working language.

In many international business settings in Europe English is the norm. Why should politics be different?

  • levosmetalo 5 years ago

    There are many reasons why using English makes sense, but saving costs on translation is just not that.

    Unless you are bilingual the lost productivity of having to use non native language in business context would easily dwarf any cost savings, due to misunderstandings, miscommunication, not "Punkt genau" documentation etc ...

    Heck, anyone can just try to do an IQ test in non-native language and see how the score drops.

  • kome 5 years ago

    > Why should politics be different?

    Because politics is not business. Business is done with the criteria of efficiency, politics use the criteria of fairness. You should be able to speak to the EU institutions with whatever language you want. Not everybody speaks English.

    Also, I don't know how many times you actually did business in an international context, and especially consumer facing stuff: you need to master the local language and good localization are often the key to success.

    For example, the Spotify team did a great job customizing their product in different contexts, creating playlist that are clearly made by natives with the help and the insight of their data.

    So it is absolutely not true that international business just happens in English: it might at a high level, but you need translations and cultural awareness to make it work.

  • afiori 5 years ago

    > The smaller EU countries will have to accept English as main working language.

    This is exactly the reason why English (nor any other language) can be the EU official language.

    That cannot happen and wont happen for at least a couple generations.

Zrdr 5 years ago

If we want to use only one official working language, it should be Esperanto. This would be neutral for any country (including Ireland and Malta). This would not be a threat to other languages and cultures.

Esperanto is easier to learn than any naturally evolved language. Its benefits are clear, it only needs a political support to thrive.

  • samueloph 5 years ago

    > Esperanto is easier to learn than any naturally evolved language. Its benefits are clear...

    Both of these statements are not true, arguable at minimum.

    Sorry for not explaining properly but if you do say something like this, is very likely that you are aware of the discussions around it and knows that this is very far from consensus in the linguistics field.

  • YeGoblynQueenne 5 years ago

    I already speak English * and I can use it to communicate with people all over teh EU who also already speak it.

    Why do we all need to learn a new common language? We already have a perfectly serviceable one.

    In any case, if we're going to go for a different common language then that really should be my native Greek because it's the language of the country who gave birth to European civilisation, and it was already the lingua franca of the people of Europe in ancient times, so there (i.e. everyone in Europe will have an argument to support their own language being the new common tongue).

    ___________

    * And French and Italian and my native Greek

  • SirHound 5 years ago

    The majority of western media and communication is in English. This would be a humongous waste of time and resources.

    • coldtea 5 years ago

      And in other centuries they were in French (the language of diplomacy), Latin, and Greek. Things change, and now is not the best time for the US empire (and UK has lost its imperial reach decades ago) -- so the "common" language could change too in 50-100 years.

      • Creationer 5 years ago

        The cultural, scientific, and commercial works that have been created in English in the past 100 years dwarf anything created in French or Latin by a gigantic order of magnitude.

        Why would we possibly switch to anything else, and lose 'access' to all that? All of the greatest movies and TV shows, the millions of scientific articles, the music, the computer code... English will never lose its position because of the amount of value that has been created with it.

        How could English ever possibly change (in the way that Latin morphed into the various European languages after the fall of the Roman Empire), when we have access to perfect digital copies of how it is spoken and written?

        • coldtea 5 years ago

          >The cultural, scientific, and commercial works that have been created in English in the past 100 years dwarf anything created in French or Latin by a gigantic order of magnitude.

          I beg to differ. Compared to the Latin and French corpus, the body cultural works created in English is paltry and subpar. And that's the British ones, American ones, even less so. I can give you scientific and commercial if you feel any better.

          >Why would we possibly switch to anything else, and lose 'access' to all that? All of the greatest movies and TV shows, the millions of scientific articles, the music, the computer code...

          Yeah, pop music, movies, and TV shows. We'd lose Happy Days, I love Lucy, Breaking Bad, the Beatles, Michael Jackson, and Kanye West. OK, and Melvin and Henry James and Hemingway. Not much loss.

          We would still have Racine, Rousseau, Rabelais, Rimbaud (and that's just part of the R).

          Plus, all the huge variety and masterpieces of the peoples of the earth, before American commercial monoculture and its marketing power ate everything else.

  • tluyben2 5 years ago

    I think it should be a common language that is already used; so English, German, French, Spanish. Of these English or Spanish are the most logical, but again; it won't happen (any time soon).

  • scrollaway 5 years ago

    Even if we apply your logic, Esperanto is still a bad choice. Interlingua would be a better one in a European context.

    • akvadrako 5 years ago

      Interlingua is not a practical alternative. It hasn't been shown to have any real-world advantage over Esperanto and the number of speakers and material is orders of magnitude less.

      For example, compare the Interlingua wikipedia to the Esperanto one.

  • lifthrasiir 5 years ago

    Let's get your facts straight:

    > Esperanto is easier to learn than any naturally evolved language.

    ...only for many Indo-European speakers.

    • skohan 5 years ago

      Esperanto was designed to be easy to learn and to lack many of the special cases and "gotchas" present in every natural language.

      There are probably many cases where it would be easier for a native of some language to learn a specific similar language (i.e. for a Dutch speaker to learn German, or a Portuguese speaker to learn Spanish), but I would not be surprised if Esperanto minimizes the cost function for the net effort required for all native speakers/all second languages.

      • lifthrasiir 5 years ago

        (While Zamenhof tried hard, unfortunately,) False.

        - The vocabulary is a big part of the language learning and it is hard to even begin with when the target vocabulary resembles nothing in your original tongues. It can be probably argued that ESL learners can learn Esperanto more quickly, but it still represents only about 1/4 of the total human population.

        - Rhotic consonants are particularly hard to pronounce correctly even for many ESL learners, and yet Esperanto retains them.

        - Esperanto by itself does not have a word order, but it does have a preferred word order of Subject-Verb-Object which is equally probable as Subject-Object-Verb but much more familiar to Indo-Europeans.

        - I think Esperanto, in spite of its original premise, has picked idioms and phrases up as well, as common in every old enough language.

        It is now widely accepted that the difference between the native tongue and the target language greatly impacts the learning curve. If Esperanto does succeed, it would not be due to the easiness, because the easiness would be highly subjective.

        • Oreb 5 years ago

          > - The vocabulary is a big part of the language learning and it is hard to even begin with when the target vocabulary resembles nothing in your original tongues.

          While this is true for Esperanto, it is also true for any other language, natural or constructed. And the idea of Esperanto is to reduce the effort learning vocabulary not through familiarity, but by deriving its vocabulary from a minimal set of roots and a system of suffixes. In Esperanto, if you know the word for "big", you automatically know how to say "small", "huge" and "tiny". This is not the case in most natural languages.

          Of course Esperanto will be much easier to learn for someone who already speaks some Germanic or Romance language than to anybody else on the planet. But even to a monolingual Chinese (or whatever) speaker, I believe building a working vocabulary in Esperanto is going to take less effort than in English, Spanish or German.

          > It can be probably argued that ESL learners can learn Esperanto more quickly, but it still represents only about 1/4 of the total human population.

          But far more than 1/4 of the total population of _Europe_, which is the only thing that matters in the context of this discussion.

          • lifthrasiir 5 years ago

            > In Esperanto, if you know the word for "big", you automatically know how to say "small", "huge" and "tiny". This is not the case in most natural languages.

            Oh? I have heard that "granda" means big, "giganta" or "kolosa" means huge and "eta" means tiny... :-)

            Of course I know what you want to say. One can derive "malgranda" (non-big, i.e. small), "grandega" (more-big, i.e. huge) or "malgrandega" (tiny) from a single root "granda". But that alone does not explain all other words! For example, the Zamenhof's original dictionary [1] lists both "grand-" and "et-" as root words while "gigant-" or "kolos-" are missing (probably later additions, haven't checked). Why the heck do you need to know both "grand-" and "et-" when one is an antonym to the other? [2]

            I'm not an esperantisto and I'm not able to discern the nuance behind all those different words, but I see a sign of the mature language here: once regular, now naturalized. It is not necessarily bad and the artificial origin can still help learning, but I would be rather careful to claim that it is "easier to learn than any naturally evolved language". And that leads to...

            > But far more than 1/4 of the total population of _Europe_, which is the only thing that matters in the context of this discussion.

            You have said universally, even though you didn't seem to realize it. And even when we concentrate to Europe, the actual number of ESL learners is not too different: 38% [3].

            But yeah, most Europeans can speak either Romance, Germanic or Slavic languages [3] that form the Esperanto grammar and vocabulary. Still, in the same census most Europeans seem to be much more interested in ESL than others [4] and it would be very hard to convince them to learn Esperanto instead.

            [1] http://www.akademio-de-esperanto.org/fundamento/universala_v...

            [2] Of course, the answer is that it isn't. "et-" is described as "marque diminution, décroissance" i.e. "marks decrease or reduction" and not strictly an opposite of "grand-". It is therefore a fault of fellow esperantistos to use it as "tiny"! </joke>

            [3] http://ec.europa.eu/commfrontoffice/publicopinion/archives/e... (2006, p. 4)

            [4] Ibid., p. 9

    • akvadrako 5 years ago

      That's not true. Esperanto is easy to learn because it's very regular, has a small vocabulary, phonetic spelling, etc...

      None of those advantages only apply to Indo-Europeans. It's not even fair to say Esperanto fits in the European language family. http://claudepiron.free.fr/articlesenanglais/europeanorasiat...

      China is also one of the largest state supporters of Esperanto. You can take classes in it at University and Radio Peking has regular news broadcasts in it.

      • lifthrasiir 5 years ago

        > Esperanto is easy to learn because it's very regular, has a small vocabulary, phonetic spelling, etc...

        I had delved into Esperanto enough to see that this is not necessarily true. (I'm a native Korean speaker with a working knowledge of English as you can see. And I'm not even opposing to Esperanto in general.) It would be great to have concrete numbers to backup this claim; by comparison, it seems that the prior Esperanto knowledge actually helps learning European languages [1], which again indirectly shows the European influence to Esperanto.

        > It's not even fair to say Esperanto fits in the European language family.

        The article correctly points out that the "European" or "Asiatic" labels are not necessarily good groupings, but that's only because those groupings completely disregard both the history and the linguistics. It is absurd to say that Esperanto is very different from other Indo-European languages because Esperanto is isolating and others are not [2]. When we are gauging simliarities the historical influence cannot and should not be dismissed.

        > China is also one of the largest state supporters of Esperanto. You can take classes in it at University and Radio Peking has regular news broadcasts in it.

        There are several Esperanto courses around the world, I'm aware of one in Korea, and that doesn't make the state a sort of supporter. Talking about China Radio International (CRI, originally known as Radio Peking), it is comparable to Voice of America (VOA) in such that both are propaganda broadcasts and target as much languages as possible. It is not special for them to have Esperanto versions.

        [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paderborn_method

        [2] That is, even after acknowledging the unusual statement that Esperanto is not agglutinative because its "affixes" can in fact freely move inside a word (and even concludes that Japanese is also not agglutinative to the similar extent). I think this is a fair assessment by its own, but it would be inappropriate to reframe the original question with a unusual definition.

        • akvadrako 5 years ago

          >> Esperanto is easy to learn because it's very regular, has a small vocabulary, phonetic spelling, etc...

          > I had delved into Esperanto enough to see that this is not necessarily true.

          Do you mean esperanto doesn't have those features (regular, small vocab, phonetic) or that those features don't make a language easier to learn?

          Because either claim sounds farfetched.

          • lifthrasiir 5 years ago

            Yes, both sound farfetched because "easier to learn" does not imply "easy to learn". Those characteristics do make the language easier to learn, but its Indo-European lineage (that I have detailed in the sibling comments) makes it much harder to learn for non-Indo-European speakers.

            • akvadrako 5 years ago

              The point is it's easier than all other human languages, not that it's easy in some objective sense - I don't even know what that would be.

              • lifthrasiir 5 years ago

                Your point is still not substantiated. There are many language pairs closer than Esperanto (I mean, there exists x and y such that `d(x,y) < max(d(x,eo), d(y,eo))`), even after the easiness due to the artificial origin is accounted for.

                • akvadrako 5 years ago

                  Of course there are languages that are so close together speakers can understand each other without even studying.

                  But I'm sure there is no language (with at least 1 million speakers) which is easier than Esperanto to learn for the average Asian. It isn't a European thing.

singularity2001 5 years ago

Be encouraged by other countries such as Pakistan and India in which English is already 'co-official':

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_territorial_entities_w...

Please also combine anglic with a conservative spelling reform: color, beautyfull, burocracys, enouf, allready...

Basically look at the most common spelling mistakes and chose those variants which are more logical than the current spelling.

The language should be called Anglic/Anglish, after the

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angles

It's already more of an ethnonym than a loconym. And ethnonym more in the sense of shared language and culture than common genes.

  • Thimothy 5 years ago

    Man, I would vote for life whoever proposed to fix english spelling. The fact I can't use in conversation many words I have learned reading because I have no idea how are spelled is my biggest grudge with the language.

new_here 5 years ago

I was raised to use British English spelling. Honestly, without any offence intended, whenever I see words like 'color', 'organize', 'oriented' and so on my mind sees it as a lazy (for lack of a better word) interpretation of the original word's spelling that has evolved in the US. I don't think the content has any less merit because of it, the authors are following the American convention. Just saying that because I'm curious as to what American's think when they read British spelling?

Also, whenever I write CSS and type 'color', I think, this was developed in America so they have complete right to spell it however they damn well please.

  • seszett 5 years ago

    > whenever I write CSS and type 'color', I think, this was developed in America

    Well just so you know, it was mainly developed on the Franco-Swiss border (at CERN) by Norwegian, Dutch and English citizens.

    The largest role of America in CSS is influencing the spelling because of its cultural weight, but not developing the language.

    • new_here 5 years ago

      Interesting, thanks for the correction!

  • tspiteri 5 years ago

    -ize is correct in British English as well; if anything it is more "original" as it comes from the Greek -izo (iota, zeta, omega), which is the origin of the suffix. In fact Oxford English Dictionary (OED) spelling, and the Hart's Rules guide, are for organize, not for organise. (On the other hand, analyze is American while analyse is British.)

    • new_here 5 years ago

      TIL, thanks for the clarification!

  • dmos62 5 years ago

    I usually stick to the British spelling as well, but I also love variety and I wish there were more "written dialects" of English that are widely accepted. I hate it when people react to different ways of talking or writing as if the other person was a child who hasn't learned the _proper_ way of doing things yet. As to the counter-argument of normalizing language use for the sake of the maximum number of people being able to easily understand each other: I think this argument underestimates peoples' capacity to communicate even when they can't understand 100% of the references or language, and it underestimates the negative effect an inflexible language has on the culture.

    In some ways, it's a dilemma of where to draw the line between "this is a person who hasn't experienced enough language and therefore is deficient in its use" and between "this is a person who's language has adapted to his micro-cultural/social/etc. context".

    I could go on and on about this. I think it's a fascinating, relevant subject.

pergadad 5 years ago

Better to stick with Irish English, which is ready the transition point. We could rename it European English jf that helps, but creating a new one would not be in anyone's interest and practically impossible: e.g. who would be the "European English" trainers? And would the EU just adopt the English dictionary and grammar the same way the UK adopted all EU legislation as own legislation for post-brexit? Just doesnt make sense.

viach 5 years ago

Great idea actually. There is also "Eastern EU English" extremely popular in Ukraine, Poland etc, should probably be adopted officially as well.

mekoka 5 years ago

Looking into the history of American English hints at why it's so powerful. It was designed for pragmatism over elitism, to favor a broad adoption of a writing system for a population of then recent immigrants, many of whom were not native English speakers or had had little access to education. Its original purpose is practicality. It only gradually became considered a viable intellectual alternative to British English with the output of American literature, from writers who were educated with it.

Most of that revolution is attributed to Noah Webster. To give some example of how it just made sense, he favored "or" over the British "our" in words such as "color" and "odor", "ter" over "tre" in "theater" and "center", "z" over "s" in "civilization" and "analyze", "e" vs "ae" in "archeology" (Brits write it "archaeology") and "paleontology" ("Palaeontology"). And many more.

  • antientropic 5 years ago

    I don't get it. How is a word like "civilization" less elitist / more pragmatic than "civilisation"? How is that a revolution? Is there any evidence that these minor spelling difference had an effect on the success of American English?

    • mekoka 5 years ago

      Because 'z' is unambiguous. If it sounds like a 'z' it must be a 'z'. Especially from the perspective of a non-native speaker, or someone who needs to learn to read and write as an adult.

      As for your other questions? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English-language_spelling_refo.... Also feel free to look up specifically Noah Webster.

koonsolo 5 years ago

I don't understand why they didn't try to unify the English language across the borders. Why are there different official variants of the same language?

I'm from Belgium and speak Flemish, our neighboring country is the Netherlands. We officially speak the same language. We have the same spelling, same rules, etc. Of course there are dialect variations, but the official language is exactly the same.

I always wondered why other countries don't try to do the same. For example Slovakia and Czech Republic. It almost is exactly the same language, and I know Slovaks were able to understand Czech. But it seems newer generations are unable to do that. So it's weird that these languages evolve away from each other, instead of towards each other.

The world is becoming smaller every day, so why not try to standardize at least the English language, which is mostly used in international settings?

But I guess it's also an ego thing, where neither UK or US (No idea which official variant they use in Australia/New Zealand) want to adopt the other countries rules.

jacquesm 5 years ago

It should, but as recently as April last year a French Ambassador decided that English wasn't good enough for him:

https://www.politico.eu/article/english-only-try-au-revoir-f...

Petty squabbles such as these diminish the EU.

  • Xylakant 5 years ago

    > French Ambassador decided that English wasn't good enough for him

    You left out one important word: "only". Traditionally, all important meetings and records in the EU are translated into the major languages, some of them are available in most, if not all official languages. That makes it easier for all european citizens to read the actual records. English might be widely spoken, but fluency varies massively among the population. There's an argument to be made that this makes sense. I certainly wouldn't trust quite a few german politicians to negotiate in english, given the lack of grasp on the language that some have repeatedly demonstrated.

    • erk__ 5 years ago

      It is pretty known that the parliment have an army of translators. Both live translating and translating law documents into most languages.

      • Xylakant 5 years ago

        Absolutely. But the decision that the Ambassador objected to was to use english-only for the records. And citizens don't have access to that army of translators and might be interested in the records too.

        • jacquesm 5 years ago

          The same held for all the other countries. Except for the UK of course.

          • Xylakant 5 years ago

            Well, I have no objection on english being the de-facto lingua franca. But my position on english being the only official language is certainly not as simple. And the same is true for german, french or any of the other official languages of the EU - neither of them are or should be the only official language in such a multilingual construct as the EU. So I share the ambassadors rejection of the notion to only use english and I do not regard that as pettiness harmful to the EU. Sure, translation costs money, but it also makes records more accessible to the citizens, and I regard that as a good thing.

            • jacquesm 5 years ago

              My country (NL) isn't small enough to have a realistic demand that everything be translated into Dutch as well. That means that for us here adaptation rather than rejection is the norm. To see other countries' representatives storm out of meetings because their linguistic preferences are not followed is one of those things that show me that the EU still has a very long way to go.

              To 'only use English' is not a dictate, if the French ambassador felt the need to have a French translation of the document then I'm sure he could have had one as fast as pens could write. The citizens of France have every right to access the proceedings but I really fail to see how they were denied that right by having the situation as sketched transpire. Besides that, leaving the meeting for sure had an effect against the French citizens' interest, effectively they were unrepresented and the damage of that action far outweighs the inconvenience of translation.

              • Xylakant 5 years ago

                I see your point, but I’d prefer if that was resolved in a different way. I’m absolutely in favor of translating all important records to all official languages in the EU.

                • jacquesm 5 years ago

                  So am I, but that was not infringed on. The EU already gave French, German and English a head start. Your typical Czech, Italian or Spanish representative would have a much better position to make that case than the French ambassador.

            • anoncake 5 years ago

              English is an official language of Ireland and Malta.

  • grenoire 5 years ago

    Pettiness aside, I guess this is the same kind of response you'd give to someone who complains about OSS lacking a certain feature: Write a patch and make a PR—to the European English language repository.

  • oauea 5 years ago

    Of course it'd be the French.

    • pulse7 5 years ago
      • xavieralexandre 5 years ago

        The 'franca' of Lingua Franca do indeed refer to the same 'Francs' who gave their name to France and the French language. But as stated in the Wikipedia Article the Lingua Franca language used in the Ottoman Empire didn't had much relation to French itself. It was a creole language heavily influenced by Italian who dominated trade at that time. 'Francs' designated western people in general, not specifically French people. Lingua Franca then become 'more french' in some regions of Ottoman Empire were France was more dominant like Lebanon.

BlueTemplar 5 years ago

And make official the EU being just an USA colony (see IT companies), just as the American Empire itself is waning. Such a wise move !

Meanwhile, Macron's proposal is impressively hypocritical(/real-political?), considering how much he has done to pump up English and diminish French...

  • sgift 5 years ago

    Using a common language in the EU makes the EU a US colony ..? Because we share the same language as the US then?

    • BlueTemplar 5 years ago

      No, it's not just about that, I mention it too (and the FA too, in a roundabout way). Why exaggerating what I said ?

BjoernKW 5 years ago

I've had a similar idea for some time now, albeit without the unnecessary focus on American English: With the UK probably - and very unfortunately - leaving the EU the latter could adopt English as its main language without any unfair advantage to one of the larger EU countries or hurting national sentiment.

I'd even go as far as to propose adopting English as the main language for legal matters, public administration, business and education in each of the EU member countries.

The language barrier is the predominant obstacle preventing a closer integration between EU countries and collaboration between businesses across borders.

A single, unified language over time could remedy that problem.

  • perfunctory 5 years ago

    > With the UK probably and very unfortunately - leaving the EU the latter could adopt English as its main language without any unfair advantage to one of the larger EU countries or hurting national sentiment.

    This is exactly the point the article makes.

Rerarom 5 years ago

Why not just adopt Esperanto? You can learn with minimal effort to read it in less than half a year. And I suppose listening skill would come naturally if one would have daily news programs in it.

antirez 5 years ago

In case we move away from English, the only thing that makes sense IMHO is Spanish, because it is very easy to pick up for most other latin-derived language speakers, and has an amazing amount of speakers worldwide. Moreover is not very hard. If EU goes for English, I totally agree US english is the best. It's phonetically simpler and more understandable, and is much more in the artworks we consume: TV series, music, movies, ...

thefounder 5 years ago

It should develop its own language, easier to spell and write perhaps taking advantage of machine learning etc during development. Something like Esperanto that is not owned by anyone but is easier to learn by everyone(within EU).

English gives an unfair advantage to native english speakers not to mention that it has a lot of legacy stuff that makes it hard to learn. Non-native speakers will always be seen as outsiders/2nd class.

  • tluyben2 5 years ago

    But everyone already speaks it. When I moved to Spain (from NL), I was flabbergasted about the level of English here; even the English teachers were impossible to understand. But now it is rapidly changing. Same in France and Germany. When I start speaking English to someone now in either of these countries, they generally understand.

    > Non-native speakers will always be seen as outsiders/2nd class.

    Not in my experience. But how would you measure that; in my personal experience, the Spanish and Brits treat my wife and me like their own.

    • thefounder 5 years ago

      >>> Not in my experience. But how would you measure that; in my personal experience, the Spanish and Brits treat my wife and me like their own.

      Of course you can measure that! Try to get a job where communication and/or "presentation" skills are important(i.e lawyer, PR, media, investment banker etc)and see how it goes. Even the accent may cost you the job. The language skills are a handicap for any non-native speaker in the job market and not only.

      • tluyben2 5 years ago

        That is still what you say; I do not see much proof of that. I work in banking and deal with much of what you say and I meet too many Dutch guys in those positions to think there is an issue. I was looking more for an objective measurement instead of a gut feel we both have.

        • thefounder 5 years ago

          What about this measurement: how many TV presenters speaking "broken english" have you seen in the UK? or broken spanish in Spain or broken dutch in Holland? I believe the number is close to zero.

  • akvadrako 5 years ago

    As a universal 2nd langauge Esperanto is indeed a much better choice. Esperanto is so easy to learn that you can even learn it for free. If you teach children Esperanto than English for the same total time as children who just learn English, the 1st group will be better at English:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaedeutic_value_of_Esperant...

  • raxxorrax 5 years ago

    True that it would give an advantage to native speakers. You can often see that being the case on the net. But I believe this effect to dwindle with time.

    Esperanto is a nice idea, but I think too few people could be convinced to learn it, if the utility of it remains questionable.

danieltillett 5 years ago

I have wondered for awhile if it is possible to have a world language - not that the world couldn't all agree (or be forced) to choose a common language, but that any single language spoken by 7.5 billion people would immediately start to fragment or the pace of change would be so fast you couldn't talk to your grandparents.

  • inawarminister 5 years ago

    It should be possible if all 7.5 billion are connected to a world-spanning Network and produce and consume similar media.

    Hollywood movies and pop music already proved this after all. And for the youngsters, video games and memes.

LargoLasskhyfv 5 years ago

Jou känn pry mei näytiff djörmänn from mai cold däd häntz! Yawollja!

Echt jetzt? Oh, really?

Why no fucking Esperanto, or Marain, Klingon, Elfish?

Lucadg 5 years ago

Language is open source. English does not belong to the UK anymore as much as Tiramisu doesn't belong to Italy or http to Tim Berners-Lee. People created these standards, let people use them, improve them and have a better life. [Edit: spelling]

ktpsns 5 years ago

So what's the definition of EU-en, compared to US-en or UK-en? I know the differences between US-en and UK-en, but I'm lacking facts about EU-en.

  • aarroyoc 5 years ago

    Metric system, date formats, currency... are the first things they pop in my mind

    • ktpsns 5 years ago

      Oh. I thought about written language, not about localization (as it comes up when being used in graphical user interfaces). As a non-native speaker in science, we always write out units (3 km or 3 miles), we write out dates clearly (July 2nd or 2018-07-02), the same with units (USD 3 or 3 EUR). As a non-application-writer, I don't see the point. As a programmer, I do, of course.

sorisos 5 years ago

I have long wished for a EU-en locale. Perhaps one day...

  • anoncake 5 years ago

    On Android, the language can be set to English (accented). Alas, that's just for testing Unicode support.

  • igravious 5 years ago

    that'd be en-EU, ¿no?

pvaldes 5 years ago

Chinese would be even better

  • BjoernKW 5 years ago

    Just because it's spoken by more native speakers than any other language that doesn't automatically make Mandarin more relevant in a global context.

    English is a global language due to its history (largely grounded in the British Empire's colonial history). Mandarin on the other hand in a global context as of today is still largely irrelevant because it's only spoken in one country, even as that country is as globally relevant as China.

    That might change in the future but unless you specifically deal with China and Chinese businesses Mandarin is no more relevant on a global level than - say - Russian or German.

    • Creationer 5 years ago

      Chinese is tonal and cannot be typed into a computer without going through the Pinyin intermediary stage. It is fundamentally ill-suited to being a modern global language.

  • wildpeaks 5 years ago

    One might think so at first glance, but it's much harder to learn (friction reduces adoption) and quite uncommon outside Asia, so it's only useful in specific situations. Plus it's not the official language of any European country.

  • tluyben2 5 years ago

    Mandarin? I would not mind that as well, but that is even more extreme than the other suggestions. It would get no votes.

  • 781 5 years ago

    English is mandatory in Chinese education, from primary school to college.

    Chinese is not mandatory anywhere in Europe.

lucb1e 5 years ago

Finished the article but I haven't seen a single proposal of what this actually would mean. EU English would be different how? And that's besides the fact that I also have yet to hear a single real advantage for forking the language and creating 15 competing standards.

Reasons like "then it's fair for everyone" doesn't make any sense when the UK is gone anyway, it would make sense right now since one country has an advantage, but not after brexit.

> It will be taking advantage of [the current] situation [since it] is already spoken by pretty much everybody.

Is the author saying it's more difficult to read or write british english than it is to read an as-of-yet-undefined EU english?

> It will rid the French or the Germans of the temptation try to make their language the dominant one

Right, once we adopt a currently fictional en_EU, they'll know they lost the battle. But the same would be true if we adopt de_EU or fr_EU or keep en_UK. Whatever decision is made, it won't lessen any discussion until said decision has been made.

> It will rid the Europeans of some of the oddities of British English which make it a tiny bit more complex

You mean adding silent letters to words like 'color' (colour) or 'no' (know)? To make the letters match the pronunciation, it needs an overhaul quite a bit larger than switching away from british english.

> It will give the Europeans some “closure” with the Brits

frowns

> It will give the EU a chance [words words words] to finally make widely understood some of the terms and notions that are specifically EU / European but are nowhere to be found in British or American English.

Like what? I have no idea what the author is talking about.

> It will give the EU a chance [words words words] to gain a stronger popular culture position on the world stage.

I think our various languages add a lot of culture rather than forking English. (Though I'd personally rather be rid of all the languages: fewer language is more convenient than yet another language.)

> It will further enable the EU’s communication with the entire rest of the world

Surely you're joking. Speaking a different language just for the sake of it helps international communication how?

> because guess what (working) language they already speak[: English]

... precisely, so why change it?

> expressions, idioms, etc. can be too specific, or “too British” [words words words], quite often those might be misunderstood or even completely missed out. Occasionally, that might be true of American English as well, but to a substantially lesser extent.

This is approaching sense. So let's have some examples? Because I still have no idea what the author is talking about, even if 80% down the article I did find the first and only sensible reason, assuming the mentioned understood-by-the-British-only expressions, idioms, etc. exist.

I'm wondering if this post is satirical or serious. Could be that I'm playing amazingly deep on someone's joke, but the other comments seem to treat it as a serious idea... not sure.

  • 781 5 years ago
    • lucb1e 5 years ago

      It's an existing thing? Interesting, I never heard of it. Thanks for linking.

      The Wikipedia article isn't very clear on what the language officially is. I don't see where I can find a reference of the changes it makes, aside from a few examples of ways to make English mainly more like French. It honestly looks as though it is just an excuse for people to use words incorrectly just because they have words in their own language that sound similar but mean something else.

      • 781 5 years ago

        You are reading too much into the article.

        The EU will never officially name this "EU English". They will just name it "English", and at most they might point to a "guide" of what some commonly used phrases which differ from British English mean.

AFascistWorld 5 years ago

Not mastering English in the 21 century is being illiterate, especially in this increasingly fascist world.

YeGoblynQueenne 5 years ago

>> More specifically, Brexit’s silver lining for Europe might have to do with unleashing the deepening of European integration in a whole bunch of areas where the Brits have been reluctant to go. After Brexit, they won’t have to, and the rest of the EU will be freed of the British veto and able to get as integrated as it wishes.

Nice- a little controversial barb hidden in a larger, already controversial (but less so) article. Who is this Ivan Dikov? He sounds like a man who likes to stir the pot just to watch it boil over.

(Not that I don't fully agree with him, mind- but it's still a controversial and rather mean opinion).

  • jcbrand 5 years ago

    I don't see anything particularly mean about that quote and it's definitely not the first time I've heard this argument brought up (that EU can continue with further integration without UK obstructionism).