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

> “We will always ask the Commission to send us in French the letters it wishes to address to the French authorities, and if they fail to do so, we will wait for the French version before sending it,” the diplomat said.

"Send us French or consider your request to be second-class and ignored until you send us French".

You can experience it in advance with Tinder Passport.

It's crazier than that. I've moved to a small village in northern Sweden in the middle of nowhere, and everybody speaks English here, too.

> Everyone's rather slim.

Agreed, but Austria beats it - there, everyone is ripped :)

Malta and the Netherlands are other countries where a large majority also speak English.

In some places in the EU the UK's union jack flag is being replaced with the Irish tricolour on bank ATM's display of language choices, which amuses the Irish.

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.

I lived in the Netherlands, worked for an international organization and I still have a lot of friends who works (or worked) in Brussels. Few comments:

1. The level of profentiency in foreign language of people working for the European institutions is orders of magnitude higher than readers of HN. Not too mention translators. It's not rare to meet people speak 6 languages totally fluently. Switching languages for some working documents is almost a non-event beyond signaling. There will be zero impact for the rest of us.

2. I totally support a Europe where people speak foreign languages beyond English.

The appeal to the popularity of English is entirely circular. Obviously you're exposed to more English if nobody makes an effort to use another language. Not an argument against changing that state of affairs.

http://www.davidpbrown.co.uk/jokes/european-commission.html

The irony.

(Latin is oppressive? I’ve heard it all. Better tell the scientists.)

English is one of the two official languages of Ireland.

Either way, I think everything you've said is basically beside the point because English is the primary international language of the business and science worlds. That's why virtually all airports everywhere in the world have English signage and announcements, that's why many international university lectures are in English. It's very practical.

For better or for worse, that's how it is, and choosing another language based on some principle of neutrality (which certainly won't really be neutral, because anyone's definition of neutrality will be biased) is going against the flow. Something like Esperanto would actually be an especially terrible choice given that there's almost no one who speaks it and virtually no entertainment media that uses it, which makes it far more difficult to learn.

Learning languages is hard enough as it is. As someone who lived in Tokyo and studied Japanese full time, it's something you really need to be motivated for to make it work.

And besides the long term costs that can be reasoned out, all sorts of emotions, insecurities, etc., will undoubtedly come flying out from many quarters.

I doubt if these sorts of topics can be discussed calmly by anyone invested in the change.

Please excuse my pedantry, but you've misspoken here: the European Council, the Council of the European Union, and the Council of Europe are three different things; and here you've accidentally said the third when you meant to speak of the second. The first two are EU institutions–the European Council is senior to the Council of the European Union, in the former EU member states are represented by heads of state or government, in the later they are represented by the ministers responsible for various policy areas (finance, agriculture, trade, transport, education, etc). The Council of Europe, by contrast, is a separate international organisation from the EU, with a much broader membership – it includes the vast majority of European countries; it is most famous for hosting the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), although it is active in other policy areas as well.

And all three have a presidency. The President of the European Council is an individual, currently former Belgian Prime Minister Charles Michel. He doesn't take orders from the Belgian government, he is truly independent. By contrast, the presidencies of the Council of the European Union, and the Council of Europe, are held by governments not by individuals. The presidency of the Council of the European Union rotates every six months, it is currently held by Portugal, Slovenia is up next. Likewise, the presidency of the Council of Europe rotates every six months; currently it is held by Hungary.

I know very little people my age that speak enough French to be able to work, however, everyone I know my age speaks English.

Some claim that learning a second language will make a person better at thinking -- or confer other broad advantages, but I am unconvinced by the evidence I have seen for those claims.

To improve him or herself and his or her society, the person would do better to spend the time he or she would have spent learning a second language learning science, history, technology and practical arts.

Switzerland wants its young people to study both French and German because it wants to remain one country and to avoid splitting into a German-speaking country and a French-speaking one. That is an example where it makes sense to advocate and to encourage bilingualism IMO. I have a lot of sympathy for the Swiss policy of encouraging bilingualism. I have much less sympathy for the general belief that bilingualism and trilingualism are good in themselves. Human lives are short; people should focus their learning on the things that most advance themselves and their societies.

I guess you could argue that all of Europe is in a milder version of the Switzerland situation: that it is necessary for European individuals to invest a lot into learning second and third language to keep Europe integrated and to prevent wars from breaking out. Maybe that is the root of the belief among Europeans that it is good to learn multiple languages.

But I can't help notice that if there were a button that when pushed, makes it so that all of Europe (or all of the world) magically becomes fluent in the same language, I would vote for pushing the button: the advantages are great (namely, freeing up time currently devoted to the learning of second and third European languages for learning more potent things) and the risks are low IMO (the main risk being the small probability that different languages really do confer on their learners significantly different cognitive strengths and weaknesses).

I'm not going to bother finding the hyperlink for the relevant xkcd comic, because we've all seen it before.

You also forget about the Maltese. The combined population of the two would still make it a middling region of France like Grand Est or a somewhere between Rheinland-Pfalz and Hesse in the case of the German Länder.

For an example of the daft amounts of human life expended on examples of such trivialities, look at the amount of effort spent on arguing if the Concorde airplane should terminate with or without an 'e'.[2]

[1] https://www.space.com/what-is-utc.html

[2] https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/cabinet-office-100/the-s...

Latin even has a large amount of texts written at a basic level. Works like Summa Theologica and the Vulgate Bible were written in extremely simple language.

It has a very small vocabulary. There are some weird edge cases (imperative plural, for example), but even they follow common rules.

See the different ways of pronouncing "tous" or the different words that have irregularly silent "l"s (e.g. fusil) and other irregularly silent consonants in the middle of words (e.g. automne).

French has quite a lot of exceptions to its pronunciation rules in addition to its already fairly complex regular relationship between letters and sounds.

EDIT: Oh I forgot my pet peeve: there are so many exceptions to the pronunciation of "er" that it's kind of misleading to give its pronunciation as the equivalent of an English "a" as in "slate" (hiver, cher, cancer, mer, the list goes on and on and on).

Sorry for being blunt but pronouncing 50% of the letters is extremely non phonetical. There's just no other way of putting it

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghoti

I was really looking forward to see the EU flourish for years now and all I see is them concerning with offense, accusations and procrastinating issues or matters that don't serve the union but rather a part of it. EU, just get over it, Brexit happened, whatever.

interesting. any sources where i could find out more?

I'm pretty sure that you can have more than one nominated language, given that Belgium and Spain have a bunch of them.

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.

They just keep playing the imperialism game in a very old-fashioned way, with little care for modern sensibilities.

More people speak English than Mandarin and that language base represents a dramatically larger economy than Mandarin does.

The long-term trends favor English over Mandarin, not least of which is due to the difficulty of learning Mandarin vs English. The demographics underpinning Mandarin use are exceptionally bad in terms of direction, whereas the demographics underpinning English use globally are exceptionally good. The past 20 years has more than demonstrated the very low interest globally in Mandarin, despite the huge increase in China's importance and economy there has been no corresponding boom in the pick-up of Mandarin outside of China. In the next 20 years Mandarin will become a contracting language, while English will continue to expand globally. Over the time that China has been rapidly rising (since ~1990), English has only become more important globally, not less. Eventually, across this century, nearly as many people in China will speak English as Mandarin (they're very hard at work on achieving that; it'll be to their benefit and they full well know it).

No, making Mandarin the working language of the EU bureaucracy wouldn't open the EU up to any additional people, and the vast majority of Mandarin speakers are subject to one government or another that has no interest in the EU (and particularly, for instance, being accountable to the European Convention on Human Rights.)

> Romansh is an European language not used in the EU; choosing it would level the playing field

No, it wouldn’t. In terms of making communication within the levels of the bureaucracy to which it applies all but impossible, sure.

Not sure why that would be the goal, though.

In every country children are told quite silly things about the world and, in particular, about the importance of their country in the world. This is even worse for current or former empires (UK, France, Germany, Spain, Italy, Greece, Russia, US, China...).

Children there are told they are special and superior in some way to other children who were born in other places. It's not surpising that they end up asuming those lies as something obvious and natural. The most striking example nowdays is of course the United States, just because they are the biggest superpower (China's children are not less indoctrinated, though). Most American adults believe that their country is the biggest democracy the world has ever seen (cough, cough, India), their lifestyle the highest (Scandinavia smiles amusingly with a barely hidden condescending gesture) or that their wars are fought just to defend freedom (and Irak invaded because of the mass destruction weapons, apparently).

In the case of France they take as reference the Napoleonic times where their country was dominant and their language the vehicule of culture and politics in Europe. They also think the French Revolution invented real democracy or something similar (even though American Revolution started more than ten years earlier and Greeks had true democracies a couple thousand years before that).

Of course, those days are long gone, but this is what French are tought since they are small children, so most of them end up believing it.

Nationalism is a serious disease and most countries are infected.

What really happens is that in the 15 last years English has gained space foot in the EU institutions, to the point that they are quickly becoming just English speaking. You have a service which used to homd all meetings in English, a new Croatian, Hungarian or Polish staff member who doesn't speak French arrives and suddenly all the meetings and mass emails are written in English. The opposite doesn't really happen.

After the start of the pandemic French suddenly lost almost all space in meetings with Member States representatives or just multiple services present. They have become English onlycause there is no interpretation anymore and many people can't speak or even understand French. Many people that chose to speak French in meetings (mostly as a matter of principle) now speak English. The change in the last year was huge. French just want to go back to the previous status quo.