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It would be interesting to see if the English spoken in Europe as an international secondary language uses more Germanic or Latinate words.

The assumption might be that they tend toward shorter, simpler Germanic words, but, I wonder if the location where it’s spoken has an effect on this. For example do English speakers in Romance countries use more Latin-origin words in English, even though they are “more difficult”?

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The answer is very easy. Latinate words (mostly of French origin for the matter), first because of the number of people speaking romance languages (French, Italian, Spanish, Romanian and Portuguese) is the largest in Europe, second, because most European languages have also borrowed a lot from Latin, Greek and French during the last centuries, which means that latinate words are usually the subset which is shared across most languages. Furthermore, English and other Germanic languages have started evolving quite early one from the others (around the 6 century) and cognates might be quite difficult to recognize: through/durch, for instance.

I looked into this a bit since posting and it’s not such a simple answer.

From the research I browsed, a few things seem to be true: speakers tend to choose words that resemble cognates in their native language; Germanic speakers seem to prefer Germanic words; the educational method and exposure to English has an effect, in the sense that Northern Europeans often have more informal exposure (and thus Germanic preference) whereas Southern Europeans have more exposure to English in an academic, Latin-preferred context.

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