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Should English be the official language? | ||
Tags: Language Politics | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| beano Diglot Senior Member United KingdomRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4623 days ago 1049 posts - 2152 votes  Speaks: English*, German Studies: Russian, Serbian, Hungarian | Message 57 of 96 01 May 2013 at 2:52pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Is there a case for making Russian an official EU language? No member state has Russian as an official language but it could serve as a unifying language for the ex-Soviet states.
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| Chung Diglot Senior Member Joined 7157 days ago 4228 posts - 8259 votes 20 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish | Message 58 of 96 01 May 2013 at 5:28pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I suspect that there's still too much historical baggage with Russian for it to be adopted there for that purpose.
Besides English often functions as the language of internal communication among the Eastern European members of the EU who natively speak one of the Balto-Slavonic, Uralic or Romance (i.e. Romanian) languages of low profile which aren't shared by everyone involved (e.g. one of my Polish friends communicates professionally with her counterparts in Hungary, Slovakia and Estonia using English considering that not all of them know Russian (or Polish, Hungarian, Slovak or Estonian), but all do know English at an advanced level). Edited by Chung on 01 May 2013 at 5:44pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| vogue Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 4255 days ago 109 posts - 181 votes Speaks: English*, Italian, Spanish Studies: Ukrainian | Message 59 of 96 01 May 2013 at 5:31pm | IP Logged | |||||
I would say given Russian-European affairs, and the views of many EU states (some of them formerly under Soviet rule) about Russia, this would not fly. Edited by vogue on 01 May 2013 at 5:55pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| patrickwilken Senior Member Germany radiant-flux.net Joined 4534 days ago 1546 posts - 3200 votes Studies: German | Message 60 of 96 01 May 2013 at 5:35pm | IP Logged | |||||
My Lithuanian grandmother would turn in her grave if Russian were adopted as an official language. 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Марк Senior Member Russian Federation Joined 5057 days ago 2096 posts - 2972 votes Speaks: Russian* | Message 61 of 96 01 May 2013 at 7:05pm | IP Logged | |||||
If we recall that the EU has more than twenty official languages, it won't shock us so much. The relations between the current members of the EU weren't always peaceful either. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| aodhanc Diglot Groupie Iceland Joined 6261 days ago 92 posts - 130 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish | Message 62 of 96 01 May 2013 at 7:10pm | IP Logged | |||||
If the EU were to adopt a core group of official languages, then they should be major international languages, spoken in several countries. So, that would exclude Polish and probably Italian. Which leaves English, German, French and Spanish as the obvious choices. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Cavesa Triglot Senior Member Czech Republic Joined 5010 days ago 3277 posts - 6779 votes Speaks: Czech*, FrenchC2, EnglishC1 Studies: Spanish, German, Italian | Message 63 of 96 02 May 2013 at 10:51pm | IP Logged | |||||
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1.can you imagine the Italians giving up their language as one of the important ones? From what i've learnt
about them and from them, they are very proud of their country and language and rightly so. 2.by excluding Polish, you would be excluding the only slavic language among the big ones. I believe that years from now, given the chance, polish could be an important business languages, especially for people with native slavic languages who find English to be too different and difficult. And it would be another sign that the newer countries in eu arentcosidered equal to the old ones. And that wouldnt help at all now. 3. You cant mean Russian seriously. The last thing we need is dragging current Russia closer to europe, you would alienate millions of people by chosing russian over their language and you cannot consider a language natives of which in eu are only immigrants and it is important secondary language only in the three ex-soviet countries You cannot think of one common language, beano. This is not the usa, which is a young country that was put together by groups of immigrants, often fleeing their countries in unhappy times. Every country here, no matter how small and useless and unimportant, has about a thousand years long history and so does the language. There were such attempts in the twentieth century and it never ended up well. P.s sorry about the mistakes, im writing from a tablet 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| hrhenry Octoglot Senior Member United States languagehopper.blogs Joined 5131 days ago 1871 posts - 3642 votes Speaks: English*, SpanishC2, ItalianC2, Norwegian, Catalan, Galician, Turkish, Portuguese Studies: Polish, Indonesian, Ojibwe | Message 64 of 96 03 May 2013 at 1:12am | IP Logged | |||||
I think Italians are extremely proud of their country, their heritage and their place in world history, but the language? Some, maybe, but definitely not all. I suppose it also depends on exactly where you are on the peninsula, too. Italy's politicians are proud of the language, or at least outwardly show themselves to be, but in recent years, there has been a real awakening of regional languages among the people. If the EU ever wants to become as cohesive as they state they want to be, they're going to have to deal with minority languages within their ranks, IMO. I think there's more pride in regional languages than there is in national ones, or at least common people are more vocal about it. R. == 1 person has voted this message useful |
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