Lingusitics EU Progress: Official Language Change to "Euro-English

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The European Commission has announced that English will become the official language of the European Union, replacing German. This transition will include a five-year phase-in plan for a simplified version dubbed "Euro-English." The discussion highlights the historical resistance among Europeans to adopt a single language due to cultural pride and the complexities of language politics. While some advocate for Esperanto as a neutral alternative, others argue that English's dominance in business and technology makes it a practical choice. Concerns about the implications of enforcing a single language, such as perceived cultural superiority and historical grievances, are also raised. The conversation reflects broader themes of globalization, language evolution, and the potential for future linguistic shifts, including the possibility of Mandarin becoming more prominent. Ultimately, the debate underscores the challenges of achieving linguistic unity in a diverse continent with deep-rooted historical identities.
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Not sure if we have discussed it before, but Europe definitely needs one language for more progress to unity. Here is an impression on the progress of that process.

Official Langauge in Europe to Change :
From German to English = “Euro-English”

The European Commission has just announced an agreement whereby English will be the official language of the European Union rather than German, which was the other possibility.

As part of the negotiations, the British Government conceded that English spelling had some room for improvement and has accepted a 5-year phase-in plan that would become known as “Euro-English”. ...cont'd
 
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Old news, Andre; the Yanks have been doing that to English for decades. :rolleyes:
 
Bah, that seems silly. I would still vote for Esperanto if I was Euro.

"Euro-English" is probably a localization option in Linux already, as we speak.
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Danger said:
Old news, Andre; the Yanks have been doing that to English for decades. :rolleyes:
We're still working it out, Danger.

BTW, if you think Mainers have a funny accent, you might want to take a little jaunt to Newfoundland.
 
Andre said:
Not sure if we have discussed it before, but Europe definitely needs one language for more progress to unity. Here is an impression on the progress of that process.

Europe has a history of hating each other - also they place a lot of emphasis in keeping their own history - not many people are going to want to disgard their own language for the sake of keeping their history. Also consider the fact that a lot of them are anti-globalization e.g. Cittaslow.

http://www.cittaslow.org.uk/
 
In another recomendation the EU decided to switch to mobile phone 'txt spk' for all communications. Apart for the time and cost savings this wil also free up large numbers of vowels which can be donated to the former Yugoslavia where many town names have suffered severe shortages.
 
There is already a common language solution for Europe - it consists of English people speaking loudly and slowly to foreigners in English. It's worked for centuries - no need to change it now.
 
mgb_phys said:
In another recomendation the EU decided to switch to mobile phone 'txt spk' for all communications. Apart for the time and cost savings this wil also free up large numbers of vowels which can be donated to the former Yugoslavia where many town names have suffered severe shortages.
Maybe this is why UK is not a full member. Wales might pose a problem, hoarding so many letters for place names.
 
  • #10
turbo-1 said:
if you think Mainers have a funny accent, you might want to take a little jaunt to Newfoundland.

I actually find the Maine accent charming in some regards; at least they're understandable. The Hawvawd twerps sound kinda fruity, though.
My primary problem is with 'yawls'. You know, as in 'yawl come over for a beer.' That covers a large part of the southern US. The worst that I knew personally were from Oklahoma, although I've heard a few from Tennessee that weren't much better. They sound like that mumbly guy from the 'King of the Hill' cartoon. I'm pretty sure that the reason they're so inbred is that nobody outside of their own families can communicate with them.
What I was actually referring to, though, was the spelling. Really now... who on Earth could use Lite, Thru, Nite etc. instead of the proper forms and expect to retain his dignity?
 
  • #11
Do I recall correctly that it was - originally - Mark Twain's text?
 
  • #12
Danger said:
I actually find the Maine accent charming in some regards; at least they're understandable. The Hawvawd twerps sound kinda fruity, though.
My primary problem is with 'yawls'. You know, as in 'yawl come over for a beer.' That covers a large part of the southern US. The worst that I knew personally were from Oklahoma, although I've heard a few from Tennessee that weren't much better. They sound like that mumbly guy from the 'King of the Hill' cartoon. I'm pretty sure that the reason they're so inbred is that nobody outside of their own families can communicate with them.
What I was actually referring to, though, was the spelling. Really now... who on Earth could use Lite, Thru, Nite etc. instead of the proper forms and expect to retain his dignity?

I've never used "y'all" much - I'm a Left Coaster. But it's such a concise word! What do those of us in the North and West have to say... "all of you people come over for a beer." There's no substitute for y'all. Too bad it makes a person sound like such an idiot just by saying it.
 
  • #13
lisab said:
I've never used "y'all" much - I'm a Left Coaster. But it's such a concise word! What do those of us in the North and West have to say... "all of you people come over for a beer." There's no substitute for y'all. Too bad it makes a person sound like such an idiot just by saying it.
We don't need a collective word for an invite. Just say "beers and burgers on the deck tomorrow afternoon" and they'll show up; and since the invite was so general, lots of them will show up with hot dogs, hamburg, rolls, salads, appetizers and other snacks. In Maine, we have a pretty strong pot-luck tradition, and nobody but a former flat-lander will show up empty-handed.
 
  • #14
http://www.spellingsociety.org/journals/j31/satires.php
 
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  • #15
Danger said:
I actually find the Maine accent charming in some regards; at least they're understandable. The Hawvawd twerps sound kinda fruity, though.
My primary problem is with 'yawls'. You know, as in 'yawl come over for a beer.' That covers a large part of the southern US. The worst that I knew personally were from Oklahoma, although I've heard a few from Tennessee that weren't much better. They sound like that mumbly guy from the 'King of the Hill' cartoon. I'm pretty sure that the reason they're so inbred is that nobody outside of their own families can communicate with them.
What I was actually referring to, though, was the spelling. Really now... who on Earth could use Lite, Thru, Nite etc. instead of the proper forms and expect to retain his dignity?

Y'all is a perfectly good contraction, as is Ain't. and i don't think people are any more inbred here than in places like pennsylvania, wisconsin, and oregon. much of what you're reacting to is suppression of the economy here for decades after the civil war and hollywood propaganda. i knew someone once that went to upstate new york on a job, and the guys there were actually asking here if we were like the characters in Deliverance.
 
  • #16
CaptainQuasar said:
Bah, that seems silly. I would still vote for Esperanto if I was Euro.

"Euro-English" is probably a localization option in Linux already, as we speak.
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isn't English already a defacto standard in business and technical communication?
 
  • #17
Proton Soup said:
Y'all is a perfectly good contraction, as is Ain't.
:eek:
Neither one is! Of course, I would expect a Yank to think that they are.
I knew a couple from Tennessee when I was a kid. The guy was a draught-dodger, so they came up here and my father performed their wedding ceremony. They were two of the nicest people that I've know. The guy wasn't too bad intellectually, but his wife failed a grade 5 reading test. He was probably on a grade 7 level. And they were teachers in the US!
 
  • #18
Danger said:
The guy wasn't too bad intellectually, but his wife failed a grade 5 reading test. He was probably on a grade 7 level. And they were teachers in the US!
We need a no teacher left behind program!
 
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  • #19
I prefer the Anguish Languish. Anybody who has not read "Ladle Rat Rotten Hut" should hie themselves to a place of penance.
 
  • #20
It's about time English was revamped. It's like using Fortran to program a modern operating system.

English takes new words from other languages, which is great, but keeps the proper spelling a lot of the time, confusing people.
 
  • #21
Other languages borrow vocabulary.

English lures other languages down a dark alley, mugs them, and goes through their pockets looking for loose grammar
...
 
  • #22
Danger said:
:eek:
Neither one is! Of course, I would expect a Yank to think that they are.
I knew a couple from Tennessee when I was a kid. The guy was a draught-dodger, so they came up here and my father performed their wedding ceremony. They were two of the nicest people that I've know. The guy wasn't too bad intellectually, but his wife failed a grade 5 reading test. He was probably on a grade 7 level. And they were teachers in the US!

i'm not a yank, you canuck, I'm a Southerner. and our grammar is better than those "youse" guys up north.
 
  • #23
lisab said:
I've never used "y'all" much - I'm a Left Coaster. But it's such a concise word! What do those of us in the North and West have to say... "all of you people come over for a beer." There's no substitute for y'all. Too bad it makes a person sound like such an idiot just by saying it.
When I married a New Englander, I discovered that "you guys" is the Yankee equivalent of "y'all".
 
  • #24
Phrak said:
Esperanto appears to be as compact as English dispite the fact it utilizes only 5 vowels, but because it is artificially structured, I think it has poor signal differentiation--doesn't preform will with background noise. How often does Esperanto use one word having more than one meaning? My guess is none.

Pardon my ignorance, but does anyone speak Esperanto, for real? I seem to remember it being a fad in the late 1970s, then it just went away. (I would Google it but I'm especially lazy tonight :redface:.)

I think languages have to be born organically - they can't simply be "made." But spelling changes may be different. We've all seen how IM spellings have caught on - unfortunately.
 
  • #25
I didn't even know what it was till just now.
 
  • #26
Proton Soup said:
isn't English already a defacto standard in business and technical communication?

It is at the moment but Europe has always cycled through various languages depending on political and economic trends. Worldwide, who knows but maybe everyone will be speaking Chinese in a hundred years' time.

lisab said:
Pardon my ignorance, but does anyone speak Esperanto, for real? I seem to remember it being a fad in the late 1970s, then it just went away. (I would Google it but I'm especially lazy tonight :redface:.)

It's had varying degrees of popularity for the last hundred years or so. I think there are enthusiasts who have conventions from time to time. There's an http://eo.wikipedia.org/" that registers at a hundred thousand articles.

It was designed as an international language specifically for the European sphere, so for Europeans who in practicality have to be all multilingual anyways it's supposed to be relatively easy to pick up. It seems to me that using an organic language there will always be people resenting whatever the dominant language is. If we are all speaking Chinese internationally a hundred years from now the non-British Europeans are all going to be asking, "Why the heck are we still speaking English?" and jockeying to get their own language a more official status.
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  • #27
Proton Soup said:
isn't English already a defacto standard in business and technical communication?

And aviation, science...
what international language is not English?
 
  • #28
CaptainQuasar said:
It is at the moment but Europe has always cycled through various languages depending on political and economic trends. Worldwide, who knows but maybe everyone will be speaking Chinese in a hundred years' time.

well, I'm not a linguist so I'm not sure what advantage Esperanto would provide. also, there are a lot of non-native english speakers that would lose their investment and have to learn another language.
 
  • #29
CaptainQuasar said:
It is at the moment but Europe has always cycled through various languages depending on political and economic trends. Worldwide, who knows but maybe everyone will be speaking Chinese in a hundred years' time.



It's had varying degrees of popularity for the last hundred years or so. I think there are enthusiasts who have conventions from time to time. There's an http://eo.wikipedia.org/" that registers at a hundred thousand articles.

It was designed as an international language specifically for the European sphere, so for Europeans who in practicality have to be all multilingual anyways it's supposed to be relatively easy to pick up. It seems to me that using an organic language there will always be people resenting whatever the dominant language is. If we are all speaking Chinese internationally a hundred years from now the non-British Europeans are all going to be asking, "Why the heck are we still speaking English?" and jockeying to get their own language a more official status.
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Please god ... not Chinese. From what I hear it is the worst to learn as a secondary language - complex - it would be hell just having to inscribe those characters much more the pronounciation is some sort of an art form also. English shall do , thank you very much.
 
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  • #30
Phrak said:
And aviation, science...
what international language is not English?

You're thinking extremely short-term. During the Classical era in the Mediterranean and the Middle East the lingua franca was successively Phoenecian, Greek, then Latin. During the Middle Ages in the Baltic it was German-esque. Further South in Europe during the Middle Ages it was Spanish as it was during the early European colonial period. During the Renaissance and later colonial period, French. And only with British and American political ascendancy during the last century and a half was it English.

You don't really think that English is going to remain the dominant language internationally forever, do you? I mean, half of the U.S. will probably be speaking Spanish within a few decades. (And the U.S. essentially has its own dialect of Spanish, I'm told, distinct from European or South / Central American dialects of Spanish; certainly its own body of literature, at least.)

Proton Soup said:
well, I'm not a linguist so I'm not sure what advantage Esperanto would provide. also, there are a lot of non-native english speakers that would lose their investment and have to learn another language.

? They wouldn't lose their investment, they'd still be able to speak English.

You know we're talking about what the official language of the European Union ought to be, right? The premise of what I'm saying is that it would prevent the E.U. from spending centuries bouncing back and forth between different official languages.

What I'm saying is that the E.U. member states would do their descendants a favor to adopt a nation-neutral and culture-neutral language now and bite the bullet. That's what the benefit of Esperanto would be in the long run, its neutrality.
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  • #31
GCT said:
Please god ... not Chinese. From what I hear it is the worst to learn as a secondary language - complex - it would be hell just having to inscribe those characters much more the pronounciation is some sort of an art form also. English shall do , thank you very much.

I've taken a little Putonghua / Mandarin Chinese and although you're correct that the writing system requires lots of memorization, and remembering and pronouncing tones is difficult coming from an atonal language, as far as speaking and verbally understanding it I found it to be easier than any European language I've studied (French and a little Spanish and Russian.) You don't really have to conjugate verbs at all, for example.

Our new Secretary of the Treasury appointee speaks Chinese and Japanese, sez the newz...
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  • #32
Proton Soup said:
i'm not a yank, you canuck, I'm a Southerner. and our grammar is better than those "youse" guys up north.
Anyone between Canada and Mexico is a Yank. And 'youse' is a New York term; you'll never hear it up here unless someone is uttering a quote from 'The Godfather'.

Phrak, it used to be that the international language of commerce was German. That and English were the official aviation languages. Things change according to socio-economic fluctuations.
 
  • #33
How do you alphabetically sort something in Chinese/Japanese?
 
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  • #34
CaptainQuasar said:
? They wouldn't lose their investment, they'd still be able to speak English.

You know we're talking about what the official language of the European Union ought to be, right? The premise of what I'm saying is that it would prevent the E.U. from spending centuries bouncing back and forth between different official languages.

What I'm saying is that the E.U. member states would do their descendants a favor to adopt a nation-neutral and culture-neutral language now and bite the bullet. That's what the benefit of Esperanto would be in the long run, its neutrality.
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that's assuming a lot. it's even got it's own http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanto" . are certain types of people attracted to esperanto?
 
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  • #35
Yeah, "youse" is pretty much just New York and New Jersey and people who pretend they're from New York or New Jersey.
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  • #36
Danger said:
Anyone between Canada and Mexico is a Yank. And 'youse' is a New York term; you'll never hear it up here unless someone is uttering a quote from 'The Godfather'.

see, that's where you're wrong. if you weren't completely ignorant of the culture here, you'd realize calling a Southerner a Yank is an insult. and yes, i realize "youse" is Yank. youse guys say "aboot" and "eh".
 
  • #37
mgb_phys said:
How do alphabetically sort something in Chinese/Japanese?

Y'know, come to think of it, I never actually learned that about Japanese during the little I took. In Chinese there's a system that counts the number of brush / pen strokes used to construct the character, then subdivides each of those groups based upon some other rules. Japanese has an additional two phonetic alphabets as well as using some Chinese characters, so I don't know whether they sort things based on the phonetics or whether they use the Chinese system.
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  • #38
Proton Soup said:
that's assuming a lot. it's even got it's own http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanto" . are certain types of people attracted to esperanto?

There's a long way to go between that and "you invaded us" or even "your soccer team beat our soccer team last year."
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  • #39
CaptainQuasar said:
There's a long way to go between that and "you invaded us" or even "your soccer team beat our soccer team last year."
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the french will hate it just because it's ugly.
 
  • #40
There are two kinds of people I can't stand in this world. People who are intolerant of other people's cultures, and the Dutch.
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  • #41
Proton Soup said:
if you weren't completely ignorant of the culture here, you'd realize calling a Southerner a Yank is an insult. and yes, i realize "youse" is Yank. youse guys say "aboot" and "eh".
And if you weren't so ignorant of international culture, you'd know that to everyone else on the planet, any citizen of the US is a Yank. And yes, when we go oot and aboot, we tend to say eh a lot. And as Turbo pointed out, Newfies have a language all of their own. The rest of us, fortunately, are born with the genetic ability to understand them.
 
  • #42
Danger said:
And if you weren't so ignorant of international culture, you'd know that to everyone else on the planet, any citizen of the US is a Yank. And yes, when we go oot and aboot, we tend to say eh a lot. And as Turbo pointed out, Newfies have a language all of their own. The rest of us, fortunately, are born with the genetic ability to understand them.

i know, that's why i must preach the gospel to you heathens. say it with me. Sou-thern-er. :wink:
 
  • #43
Danger said:
And if you weren't so ignorant of international culture, you'd know that to everyone else on the planet, any citizen of the US is a Yank. And yes, when we go oot and aboot, we tend to say eh a lot. And as Turbo pointed out, Newfies have a language all of their own. The rest of us, fortunately, are born with the genetic ability to understand them.

Danger! You'nes are in rare form for 'e'nes over here.
 
  • #44
Phrak, you're perilously close to sounding Welsh. :-p
 
  • #45
CaptainQuasar said:
There are two kinds of people I can't stand in this world. People who are intolerant of other people's cultures, and the Dutch.
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You know, I was thinking of that exact line a few minutes ago.
 
  • #46
europe isn't going to accept one language, no matter what any comission says. europeans are simply too self-centered and stubborn to let their pride down. that's not a generelization of europe, that's a generalization of every culture on this planet. especially when it is pressed with foreign influence. so its official status will only be on paper.

making english the official language of a continent basically sends out the message that "we english are superior, and its time to purge all of your pagan languages". you'll get countless arguments as to what the official language should be and all that. there is simply too much history entrenched in the old world countries, and they would not let it go.

such uniformity does not sit well with a country unless you enforce it with a blade. this may have worked back in the day when england was shooting people with only had sticks, but it would not hold in a developed continent like europe.
 
  • #47
Esperanto will never be a success. More and more Europeans speak English, also in Eastern Europe. But it's going to take many hundred years to unite Europe under a common language. This is of course not only about pride.

Even if it may seem boring at first glance, I hope the whole world will speak one language in the future. The language barrier is the most important barrier between people today. I want some cultural diversity to remain, but the world should be united under a common language, common human rights and common laws.
 
  • #48
leopard said:
Esperanto will never be a success.

IMHO it seems unquestionably a success; 120 years after being invented in Poland there are probably more people worldwide who have varying degrees of fluency in it than constituted the population of Poland in the year it was invented, there's a relatively large body of literature and as I mentioned a hundred-thousand-article-plus Wikipedia, the size of the Czech or Romanian Wikipedias and larger than 95% of the WikiMedia encyclopedia projects out there. That does not seem too shabby to me.

Do you think anything you personally invent will have have that kind of staying power and broad appeal? I certainly don't think I've come up with anything close.

Predicting the demise of Esperanto seems to be a perennial hobby for some people. I remember hearing the same thing said ten and twenty years ago, and of course it's since then that the entire Esperanto Wikipedia has been built.

Yeah, Esperanto may never become the international language but as the first widely adopted one it has proven that it's entirely possible for an artificial language to be viable. And it did so starting off when global literacy was pretty low and before anything like the internet or machine-assisted translation existed. How's about that, imagine if there was as successful a campaign based around an artificial language that had been specifically designed as an intermediate for machine-assisted translation between a set of other ones...

It just seems to me like one of these centuries some pluralistic society, Indonesia or some region of Africa or Asia or something, is going to pioneer officially using an artificial language and Esperanto will have been an important stepping stone to that.
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  • #49
I am Korean. I use broken English for international communication.
For Koreans to learn Japanese is easy,
but to learn English is very difficult because of grammatical structure.
I ignore who criticize my bad English.
I call that kind of English user as Yankeeglish user.
 
  • #50
but by what standard to you select an official language?

if its by numbers, mandarin should be the global language hands down. about a sixth of the world speak it, which more than twice as many as know english.

or do we go by what nation is the most prosperous? then english would win, but keep in mind a lot of our prosperity is through theft, murder, and exploitment.

or do we go by the most logical language? english wouldn't qualify, latin languages are more structured than english will ever be. perhaps if we devise a new language entirely?
 

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