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> and english as spoken in Europe, for which many words are not known to native english speakers. Have some examples of these english words that native english speakers wouldn't know?
You can find some at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/pseudo-anglicism . Even more of them can be found in business language, which did not become loan words.
2 remarks: - of course Europe's largest economies are going to be the least incentivized to adopt English due to their larger internal market both in terms of culture as well as economics. - The International Englishes (plural) are different from both UK and US English. The scientific community has its own 'dialect', and the EU political/administration/diplomatic English is different still. Standard tests based on US…
As a Spanish person, I can confirm that average English proficiency in Spain is poor in absolute terms. It has often been reported to be the country that speaks English worst in the EU, and it may very well be (although the French also deserve a honorable mention). But I find the claim that it has been declining since 2014 very difficult to believe, to say the least. English is studied in primary school, which wasn't…
English is studied in primary school, which wasn't the case 20 years ago... That's tricky. Years ago primary extended from 1st to 8th grades (6 to 14 y.o. aprox.) so English, that started in 6th was primary. Now 6th to 8th have been moved to ESO. Anyway I just checked with my son and he started in Infantil , so it's really soon. The real issue is qualification. To really understand and speak English you need to learn…
I guess the take away is that teaching a whole country a new language takes time and is hard to accelerate.
My pet theory is that English proficiency is much better in countries where movies are subtitled, not dubbed. Incidentally it also explains why native english speakers tend to have no idea about other languages. The rise of youtube talking heads should also help... i'm pretty sure my daughter got most of her english from there.
English is on course to eat up smaller languages. Mass communication has brought the world closer together, and with that, diversity is lost. It’s too early to say whether it’s for better or for worse, but here we are.
No, they simply are not [2]
France has INCREASED as per the report, Spain has dropped.
"English proficiency levels are rising in the European Union, with more EU countries than ever in the Very High Proficiency band. France’s scores have improved for the past two years"
[0] https://www.ef.com/wwen/epi/
[1] https://www.ef.com/epi/regions/europe/
[2] https://www.ef.com/__/~/media/centralefcom/epi/downloads/ful...
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> My pet theory is that English proficiency is much better in countries where movies are subtitled, not dubbed. That is how I learned the basics of the english language when I was a kid. Here in Portugal movies are subtitled. Incidentally, I went to Milan once to participate in this thing, and neither Italians, Spanish, French, Polish and Russian people could understand each other. I speak a little bit of everything…
I was horrible in English while at school and internet access wasn't widely spread. Regular use is pretty important in my opinion. Instantly switching languages is hard though. You end up with sentences that make absolutely no cheesecake and fail you grammar basic if you switch to your native tongue again. Often happens to me after work when I was consuming content in English for a longer period of time. Nearly every…
It is not that they are failing in English, rather that they are less dependent on foreign content, having localized versions from whatever might be relevant. As polyglot speaker, I am really thankfully to have been brought up learning multiple languages. English only got relevant during the last century, and as human history is full of different kinds of lingua francas throuhout the milenias, others will follow.
We already have many localised Englishes across the world, American, Australian, Indian, various pidgin English, but also in politics, business, social media there are "New Speak" version of English in those contexts.
One of these will evolve to be the lingua franca of the young connected people and dominate. And then be superseded by the next evolved language.
Once we colonize Mars and elsewhere there will be some interesting forks in languages I am sure.
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English grammar has diverged a lot from the other Germanic languages, and its vocabulary is about 50/50 Germanic/Romance. And maybe things are different for Spanish and Italian, but French has had a huge Germanic influence (it is even named after the Franks that ruled it for a long time); e.g., there are many turns of phrase that you can translate word for word.
Exactly; what English shares with German is mostly words from a small village in the year 1000. You can talk about water, bread, beer and brothers, but anything more complex is out of the question. "Complex" and "question" are both latin-origin words for instance. So are "instance" and "origin". I had a vastly easier time learning Italian than German as a native English speaker. Of course there were confounding varia…
We get 'Fort' from French, but the equivalent concept 'Stronghold' has Germanic root words and construction.
What does that prove?
Yet your central point remains, the core of the language is Germanic.