Well, it does help when 320+ million people speak the same language. That's a huge consumer advantage that any US startup has.
Case in point: takeaway.com
Edit: it's also an ongoing cost, so the earliest you start to support additional locales the more expensive your general product development becomes. Once start to translate your UI you now have to keep it up-to-date all the time. The more translations you have the more expensive that process is when developing new features, both in actual time/energy to be sure that your UI/UX work well in your supported locales, and expenses for translators.
But that's it. Local languages are dominant for any other situation. And while English is the main language used for business, the majority of people don't speak it fluently.
That varies a lot per country, for example Sweden and Norway are really good at teaching English, Austria, Germany and Belgium are ok, France, Spain, and Italy are bad.
You can see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EF_English_Proficiency_Index for some comparison between countries.
It'll be interesting to see what happens after Brexit. My guess is that English will remain as the common language in Europe. It's too entrenched now. And the Irish still speak it (for now).
In fact my personal wish would be the standardization on European English, at the same level as UK English, US English, Indian English, etc. and define it as our common EU language, bound to the pan-EU identity.
But I’m dreaming :)
Doesn't European English as a separate dialect have a lot of problems?
The English that Europe uses is so mangled that English speakers can't understand it. It often means the exact opposite of what is intended, sometimes dangerously so (see 'so-called' for example.) This leads to less understanding, rather than more.
https://www.eca.europa.eu/Other%20publications/EN_TERMINOLOG...
A US or UK English speaker will face issues when talking with a Indian English speaker, or an Australian English speaker.
In practice we already use EU English, both in official documents and communications, and in casual exchanges. We just don't recognize it officially.
The document you share is using UK English as the standard to follow, which explain why there are some differences.
> This leads to less understanding, rather than more.
That leads to a common language WITHIN the EU, which is what we don't have currently. I mean, again, we do have European English, we just don't recognize it, and it isn't as spread as it could be. The differences with other forms of English are small enough to increase the general communication between EU citizens and other English speakers in the world, but as you said also comes with a few differences that can cause misunderstanding. I work in international environments with people from all over the world, we already face those issues and they aren't a big deal.
I think you're being very generous there in painting it as some kind of naturally occurring dialect of a culture.
> The document you share is using UK English as the standard to follow
Incorrect. It refers to and compares against Irish English and US English as well, as people would in fact normally understand it. It's not academic or prescriptive.
> In practice we already use EU English, both in official documents and communications, and in casual exchanges.
You can't convince me people are using contorted jargon like 'financial envelope' in casual exchanges with anyone.
These are the problems in practice:
> the European institutions also need to communicate with the outside world and our documents need to be translated – both tasks that are not facilitated by the use of terminology that is unknown to native speakers and either does not appear in dictionaries or is shown in them with a different meaning
It's not just a case of 'not recognising it officially' - nobody understands it and dictionaries (of any dialect) don't help.
What is the point of a dialect that only people writing reports, not reading them (the actual people they're governing), understands?
I'm talking about the way the language is used by European citizens.
An example of some common differences can be found here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euro_English.
Some of theme are quite funny if you're familiar with European languages :)
No we mean the same thing. The Wikipedia article you posted even links to the report I posted as a reference for what they mean!
That’s an EU report, by the way, criticising EU English as confusing and not understandable by citizens of any country unless they’re EU officials. That’s not a useful shared dialect!
The reason to standardize European English would be to give the 400+ millions people living in the EU a common, shared language they could identify with. These people already use in their daily life a form of English that doesn't follow US or UK standards. It is obviously understandable by citizens, otherwise they wouldn't be able to use it. They are right now using this weird, bastardized version of English to do business, communicate with friends, with their families, etc. This European English is already a de-facto language used for communication between EU citizens. Instead of telling them to correct their use of the language because it fails to follow British standards, I would like this distinct form of English, as it is practiced, to be recognized.
And if that offenses British English speakers, then that's fine, they will adapt the same way they already do.
Not consider? You linked to the Wikipedia article on it saying that this is what you were talking about.
Don't forget that English is indeed a secondary language in the Republic of Ireland - their first official language is Irish. So what they said still holds true including the Republic of Ireland.
While I can speak English mostly without any special effort, it sometimes surprises me that I need time (up to 2 seconds maybe) to switch, when someone is asking me something. As in at first it doesn't even register as English, more like thinking what was that?. Then, delayed I suddenly understand. Of course it depends on the situation (environment, other sounds, other speakers, and so on, too) and the accent/dialect of the speaker. In other cases no problem at all, like instant switching without any hassle/thinking about it.
It depends/varies in strange ways :)
I think of it like this: we have an interpretation subsystem to interpret messages carried in sound (in whichever language). It's a soft real-time system. Typically it succeeds in interpreting good inputs, making its deadline, and it decisively rejects invalid inputs (on account of mumbling, overwhelming background noise, etc), also within the deadline. Occasionally it succeeds in interpreting a sound signal but misses its deadline.
There's also a request-repeat subsystem, which may fire any time after the interpretation subsystem has either rejected an input as invalid, or missed a deadline. When it fires, we say something like What was that? to request retransmission of the previous message.
When the interpretation subsystem misses a deadline but then succeeds, it races the request-repeat subsystem, so there's a chance of a What was that? being uttered immediately before successful interpretation of the previous message.
:)