La grandeur.
French set to replace English as EU’s ‘working language’
31–40 of 392 posts
Re: French set to replace English as EU’s ‘working language’
#32Ultimately it will be JavaScript anyway :)
Re: French set to replace English as EU’s ‘working language’
#33Re: French set to replace English as EU’s ‘working language’
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's no other country in the EU that speaks French, either. And by numbers, German should prevail.
Your first point is incorrect: Belgium, Switzerland, Luxembourg, and Monaco [1] http://www.bbc.co.uk/languages/european_languages/languages/...
Switzerland and Monaco aren’t in the EU
Re: French set to replace English as EU’s ‘working language’
#35Why not arabic? French is kind of obsolete.
Mandarin would open the EU to the largest number of speakers. Spanish would be a good second, if English is politically untenable, but of course it's already an official EU language so choosing it might annoy the other states.
Romansh is an European language not used in the EU; choosing it would level the playing field (and would not be so politically complex as another such like Basque).
Re: French set to replace English as EU’s ‘working language’
#36This is too funny to take seriously.
Re: French set to replace English as EU’s ‘working language’
#37Sometimes countries insist of fighting wars that have been over for a long time. This is one example. American attitude towards China rise is another example. Now more seriously, I think what the French are trying to do is just to avoid a complete switch to English in the EU institutions. Since the start of the pandemic, most meetings which used to be multilingual (with interpretation) are now English only and nobody…
Why are they worried? English isn't English anymore. In fact it makes sense to chose a language that isn't the native language of any EU nation. (I'm squinting regarding Ireland).
Unfortunately (or fortunately), English is practically the native tongue of Ireland now (and has been since the 18th century, to be honest).
Re: French set to replace English as EU’s ‘working language’
#38Only Ireland has English as their primary language of the EU so it makes sense.
It seems Ireland's official language of the EU is Irish:
https://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/E-8-2018-00402...
Re: French set to replace English as EU’s ‘working language’
#39I can see the logic, since UK isn't part of the EU anymore, but considering over all amount of people who can speak and understand English vs France EU wide this is pretty silly show of power. After all even if EU matters were done purely in french it wouldn't be "the killer feature" to make french be taught much more in schools since english is the universal business language. And even if EU states decided that they…
as a non-chinese person, in Taiwan currently I would say otherwise. with Chinese learning english to remain competitive.
And currently english schools demand a premium. And likewise foreign english teachers are paid more than locals.
Taiwan for example wants to become bilingual by 2030. though, personally, I don't see that happening.
Majority of business communication worldwide is already in english so are technical docs. well, unless it's electronic stuff which is in chinese | german. Culturally america's most known exports are in english.
So yeah, what France is pushing is largely stupid, though i'm an ardent listener of French hip hop.
Re: French set to replace English as EU’s ‘working language’
#40> "...Globish – that ersatz of the English language, which narrows the scope of one’s thoughts..."
So the EU's argument in Le Figaro is basically the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis?