Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

French set to replace English as EU’s ‘working language’

independent.co.uk

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 392 posts

Re: French set to replace English as EU’s ‘working language’

#171

Post by fumblebee »

throwaway-571 wrote: post #148
heinrichhartman wrote: post #19

The sane thing to do after the Brexit, was to embrace English as main language, since it has not become neutral ground! According to Wikipedia we have: * Germany: 56% English speakers, 14.5% French speakers * Italy: 34% English vs. 19.43% French * Spain: 22% English vs. 11.73% French * Sweden: 89% English vs. 8% French I can't get over how bad this decision is. How can you ignore these kinds of discrepancies? [1] htt…

I think embracing english as the main language of the EU is the worst idea since Brexit. It’s anything but neutral. It’s a concession made to the brits and a trojan for the Americans. They left, they can f right off and take their piss poor excuse of a language with them. It works for programming, insults and not much else. If they hadn’t joined the EU to sabotage it, maybe english wouldn’t be as popular in the EU. L…

What a depressingly resentful and scornful take against op’s well reasoned comment. Taking a position is fine, shouting through your keyboard is discouraged.

Re: French set to replace English as EU’s ‘working language’

#174

Post by bouzouk »

Anyone living in France and knowing how Emmanuel Macron has behaved those past few years can say without a doubt that this article cannot be further from the truth. He has been scorned several times for using English too much, eg for diplomacy between non English speaking countries https://www.francetvinfo.fr/politique/emmanuel-macron/video-... (sorry, in French :) )

Re: French set to replace English as EU’s ‘working language’

#176

Post by varajelle »

dmurray wrote: post #130
gumby wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

English is the dominant language of Ireland, Malta (and Scotland and Wales) but as each has a "national" language and English had already been selected by the UK, Ireland nominated Irish and Malta Maltese as an official EU language. So at the moment there is no country that has claimed English as its official language for EU purposes, thus it's legally OK to ignore anything official from or within the EU that is in E…

Malta and Ireland benefit from having an official language. The EU employs Irish and Maltese translators in extremely well paid tax-free jobs. Maybe Austria would do it? It's the only EU country I can think of that doesn't claim to have its own language. Edit: also Belgium and Luxembourg.

Luxembourg has its own language

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

Re: French set to replace English as EU’s ‘working language’

#178

Post by throwaway-571 »

cipher_system wrote: post #82
heinrichhartman wrote: post #19

The sane thing to do after the Brexit, was to embrace English as main language, since it has not become neutral ground! According to Wikipedia we have: * Germany: 56% English speakers, 14.5% French speakers * Italy: 34% English vs. 19.43% French * Spain: 22% English vs. 11.73% French * Sweden: 89% English vs. 8% French I can't get over how bad this decision is. How can you ignore these kinds of discrepancies? [1] htt…

For Sweden and Germany all (guess >99%) of the french speakers speak english way better then french. The amount of english we're exposed to is so massive and the french is basically non-existent. This is such a useless egoistic move from the french, just accept that english is the lingua franca.

I’m french and most of the content i watch is also in english, made mostly by americans with an american point of views and ways of resolving problems. Sometime in british english with british point of view.

I think it’s sad that that you don’t seem to realize that it’s a problem that most of the content we are exposed comes from a single culture.

As for the move, it’s totally useless, and if they wanted to be strongest against english they should have said “we’ll only accept communication in french or german” but that would have meant most of the communications would have been in german.

Re: French set to replace English as EU’s ‘working language’

#180

Post by CoastalCoder »

forty wrote: post #140
heinrichhartman wrote: post #19

The sane thing to do after the Brexit, was to embrace English as main language, since it has not become neutral ground! According to Wikipedia we have: * Germany: 56% English speakers, 14.5% French speakers * Italy: 34% English vs. 19.43% French * Spain: 22% English vs. 11.73% French * Sweden: 89% English vs. 8% French I can't get over how bad this decision is. How can you ignore these kinds of discrepancies? [1] htt…

I'm French and honestly I don't really care that much about that but for some reason if I had to choose, I'd rather have EU things done in German for example than English, that would make much more sense to me (even though I speak some English and really no German).

Can you elaborate on your reasons?
Post reply on HN