EU Hints It May Stop Speaking English To Spite UK, by Ryan McMaken.
Danuta Hübner, the head of the European Parliament’s Constitutional Affairs Committee, declared that English will not be used by the EU once the UK leaves. Hubner apparently was able to keep a straight face when she declared: “’We have a regulation … where every EU country has the right to notify one official language,’ Hübner said. ‘The Irish have notified Gaelic, and the Maltese have notified Maltese, so you have only the U.K. notifying English.'”
“‘If we don’t have the U.K., we don’t have English,’ Hübner said”
The EU’s lust for revenge against the UK is clear enough, but it’s laugh-out-loud funny to suggest that people in the EU-member states of Malta and Ireland will suddenly prefer to conduct business in Maltese and Irish.
Nearly 90 percent of the Maltese speak English as a second language, and nearly all Irish speak English as a first language. The idea that the Irish would rather do business in the Irish language to send a message to English voters is not exactly plausible.
So, not only does the EU still have two member states that are essentially English-speaking countries, but the idea that the EU would cut itself off linguistically from many of the world’s richest countries is a non-starter. In fact, four of the top-ten largest economies on earth (i.e., USA, UK, Canada, and India) employ English either as the primary language or as the lingua franca of business and science.
Moreover, English is apparently already the day-to-day business language in Brussels. Assuming the UK ever actually leaves the EU, there’s no danger of English going anywhere.
Part One: Brussels should ditch english language, french mayor claims, by Julian Robinson.
A French mayor has called for Brussels to ditch its use of the English language after Britain voted to leave the European Union. …
Meanwhile, the left-wing presidential candidate, Jean-Luc Mélenchon said English can no longer be the ‘third working language of the European Parliament’.
According to The Local, 51 per cent of EU citizens can speak English as a first or second language while just over a quarter can speak French and nearly a third can speak German. …
In 2013, an EU report revealed that English had squeezed out every other language in the competition to become the common tongue of Europe. It found that English is the most popular foreign language in all but five European countries, and all of those are small nations that use the language of their larger neighbours. The report also found that two out of three people across the continent have at least a fair working knowledge of English.
The report published by the EU statistics arm Eurostat suggested that the dominance of English was likely to become even greater in the future.
It found that 94 per cent of secondary school pupils and 83 per cent of primary age pupils across the EU are learning English as their first foreign language, more than four times as many as learn French, German or Spanish. Only in Britain and Ireland is French the top foreign language in schools.
hat-tip Matthew
