I have long wished for a EU-en locale. Perhaps one day...
EU must adopt ‘EU English’ as its official working language after Brexit (2017)
41–50 of 267 posts
Re: EU must adopt ‘EU English’ as its official working language after Brexit (2017)
#42The 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…
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.
Re: EU must adopt ‘EU English’ as its official working language after Brexit (2017)
#43The 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…
> 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.
Re: EU must adopt ‘EU English’ as its official working language after Brexit (2017)
#44Adopting 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?
> 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.
Re: EU must adopt ‘EU English’ as its official working language after Brexit (2017)
#45It 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 outside…
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.
Re: EU must adopt ‘EU English’ as its official working language after Brexit (2017)
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is pretty known that the parliment have an army of translators. Both live translating and translating law documents into most languages.
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.
The same held for all the other countries. Except for the UK of course.
Re: EU must adopt ‘EU English’ as its official working language after Brexit (2017)
#47I 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.
Re: EU must adopt ‘EU English’ as its official working language after Brexit (2017)
#48Pick 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…
咱们都应该说中文。
Re: EU must adopt ‘EU English’ as its official working language after Brexit (2017)
#49The 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…
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…
> 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.
Re: EU must adopt ‘EU English’ as its official working language after Brexit (2017)
#50Great idea actually. There is also "Eastern EU English" extremely popular in Ukraine, Poland etc, should probably be adopted officially as well.
We also have Dunglish [0]! Actually we get around easily using it in Eastern Europe!