EU must adopt ‘EU English’ as its official working language after Brexit (2017)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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