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EU & Languages: Policies and your view? | ||
Tags: Europe | Multilingual | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| doviende Diglot Senior Member Canada languagefixatio Joined 5803 days ago 533 posts - 1245 votes  Speaks: English*, German Studies: Spanish, Dutch, Mandarin, Esperanto, Hindi, Swedish, Portuguese | Message 17 of 66 04 July 2010 at 2:37pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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An interesting discussion so far. Hopefully we can keep it from being too flamy.
Firstly, I want to strongly disagree that English was "just in the right place at the right time". If you investigate the recent and decades-old history of Britain and the USA, a long-standing part of their foreign policy is to spread English everywhere and try to convince everyone that English is what they should learn, mainly because this clearly benefits them economically if everyone speaks their language. It doesn't have to be some evil conspiracy in a smoke-filled room...it just benefited them financially, and still does to this day (and they continue to have these policies and spend lots of money promoting English). On the topic of Esperanto, it doesn't really borrow much in terms of grammar from the romance languages. The grammar is actually more similar to Turkish and Chinese in a lot of ways, because of the word-compositing. In the vocab, there are plenty of words that are Germanic in origin too. The highly European-based vocabulary is a huge advantage for Esperanto as an auxiliary language in Europe, it seems to me. When so many people already know a little bit of English here, a little bit of one of the Romance languages there, and a bunch of German, then all of them would find it quite easy to jump into Esperanto and get fully fluent rather than half-ass understandable in one of the national languages. I've been rather helpless here in Slovakia, because so few people seem to be fluent in either English or German. I used hand-signals and my extremely limited Slovakian skills to buy a train ticket the other day, but I couldn't manage to ask anyone successfully how long it was until my stop, but luckily I had my GPS in my bag. I managed to buy some ice cream in German though. :) 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| cordelia0507 Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5655 days ago 1473 posts - 2176 votes Speaks: Swedish* Studies: German, Russian | Message 18 of 66 04 July 2010 at 3:17pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Interesting! I've been wondering about that and have been suspecting that might be the case... Many words from spoken Polish (which is heard a lot in the UK right now) sound similar to Russian words). I agree with you that people need to be practical and sensible and leave the past were it belongs. All nations develop and learn. Just look at the compassion coming from all across Russia towards Poland at the tragic death of your president. For me personally (I'm Swedish); All things equal, German would have been the most convenient European Lingua Franca, out of the big languages. French was HARD work for me at school. Pronounciation and different grammar. I started English so young that I didn't reflect much about out, apart from thinking it sounded very unnatural. German is a language I heard from an earlier age than English, and it just sounded to me like a more complicated version of one of the Scandinavian language... But it has some familiarity about it that I never felt with English and certainly never with French, Spanish or Russian. As it happens, I speak native-like English and the current situation works very much to my (personal) advantage. I have no reason to want to change it from a personal perspective. My interest is more strategic, academic. Additionally I happen to like the UK and British people very much (although I don't agree with some aspects of its foreign policy). But I am not sure I like it so much that I think that its' fair that Britains' language should be spoken by everyone else in Europe. I think the current situation needs to at least be discussed, and possible revised. As many people here know; my opinion is that Esperanto is the perfect lingua franca for Europe. But I am an idealist and visionary! 1) So easy to learn - people with no talent for languages can still pick it up to a decent level in only a year or two and go on to do things they enjoy more. 2) Nobody can take offense because Esperanto belongs to no country. 3) It would be our own, not the language of a foreign/past empire. 4) It would not initially pose no serious challenge to national languages since it's not a major language for culture or music (unlike English or French etc). People who are interested could continue on to learn English, Chinese, Arabic or the language(s) of their nearest large or small neighbours... Of course, a project would this realistically would not start in a democracy. It would take a dictator to kick it off and implement it. The only other way things would change would be by economic incentives. And sadly there is no economic power in Esperanto. So I know that what I am envisaging is a pipe dream. On the other hand; Germany could continue to grow in economic importance and German could gradually end up on a shared first place with English. Singapore (not a democracy) is "trying" to consciously manipulate its language policy by discouraging people from speaking Chinese dialects and encourage them to use Chinese Mandarin and English. The policy has been running for well over a decade and is beginning to pay off. They give rewards to people who make an effort to speak Mandarin and have competitions and prizes and much more. Quite interesting experiment. Edited by cordelia0507 on 04 July 2010 at 3:48pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Sennin Senior Member Bulgaria Joined 5851 days ago 1457 posts - 1759 votes 5 sounds | Message 19 of 66 04 July 2010 at 4:09pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
The official "target" is that every European citizen should speak 3 EU languages fluently. There is a deadline for achieving this, 2020 or something. I can't remember exactly. There won't ever be a single "official" language, be it English, German, Russian or French. Esperanto is also out of the question, 'cause it sucks ^_^. The effort is to promote multilingualism. The EU is having some trouble with the translation of legal documents, with so many member states and official langs. That's why there is a lot of funding for automated machine translation; a lot of smart people are doing PhDs in machine translation, and suchlike :). Edited by Sennin on 04 July 2010 at 4:38pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Thatzright Diglot Senior Member Finland Joined 5489 days ago 202 posts - 311 votes Speaks: Finnish*, English Studies: French, Swedish, German, Russian | Message 20 of 66 04 July 2010 at 4:26pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Well, I must admit that if we take the "Let's leave the past behind" viewpoint, the idea of German as the ideal European lingua franca does make sense. Germany has extremely well taken responsibility for its (quite brief) totalitarian past - sometimes in my opinion even to the point where they're doing it too much and should just be proud of being the great country that they are today - , and is a wonderful option for the "leader" (heh) of Europe of sorts. I'll just leave my assessment of this here, since anything futher would lead to personal opinions that would most likely be in conflict with a lot of others.
After having slept on the subject, I think that Esperanto could work as a lingua franca. Even though it does borrow only from major European languages, atleast it borrows from multiple of them and mixes them up quite nicely - even if the general feel of the language still just has this Spanish-like vibe to it to me. I'm not sure about Esperanto not being able to be implemented under democratic circumstances. If the powers that be of the EU actively started encouraging the studying of the language and said that the intention would be, for example, to gradually introduce it as a second continental-wide equivalent to English, I could potentially see it working. This would be especially since all Europeans would be learning it at the same time and so if we were being forced to learn a new language, atleast we'd all be being forced together! : D Also, it would be a "neutral" language in a political sense, and wouldn't cause a huge outcry atleast from a political standpoint. But again, if this were to happen, I think 99% of the continent would respond to it with a common "Lol wat" and return to their usual activities. I don't know, it's all quite complex really. Quite weird, actually: I don't see a problem with English being the lingua franca of Europe, but somehow anything else than Esperanto besides it seems a little... I don't know, "forced"? I know it's not really, but that's a mental image that I get. But again, all of this, is this really necessary? English already occupies a place that a language, frankly, one day needed to occupy as a continental means of communication. Finland uses a composition, possibly originally a drinking song, by a German composer as its national anthem - this song was also originally written in Swedish, and some people have made arguments that it should be changed to a hymn called "Finlandia" that was composed by the Finnish Jean Sibelius and had words written to it by a Finn in the early 1940's. This would seem nice. It would be "ours" and not somebody elses. However 95% of the population of the country is used to the current one and it has come to symbolize a lot of things, and there is no real initiative to change it - is there even a need to do so? Would it look pretentious to change it? Sure, a 100% Finnish national anthem would be nice, but we already have an anthem... I can't really come up with a coherent "core message" for what I'm trying to say, so I'm just rambling here... 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Derian Triglot Senior Member PolandRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5125 days ago 227 posts - 464 votes Speaks: Polish*, English, German Studies: Spanish, Russian, Czech, French, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 21 of 66 04 July 2010 at 4:54pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Well, there are actually 2 answers to the question of which language is easier for Poles to learn. Russian is easier for us to learn on a level where we can communicate with other people. We just need to learn a bit of new vocabulary (a lot is already familiar to us), get to know the crucial false friends and basically we can apply Polish grammar, which will work fine and will make us understood. Thus, it takes us 10 times less time to be able to communicate in Russian than it does to communicate in English. This opens the doors to social interaction, radio, television, however it is not enough to pass exams on an academic level. Because if you want to do that, then there are no shortcuts - you have to learn everything there is to learn without skipping those aspects of the language where you could successfuly use russified Polish equivalents. And that's why many Poles would say that it is English that is the easier language. Because after you have acquired the new vocabulary and learned the new grammatical concepts, then - because of the languages' simplicty - it doesn't take much effort and time to get to a level where you can speak English properly, i.e. without making grammatical mistakes.
But on the national level, Russia has always been the big brother that beats you and steals your toys. Our relationship will always be ambiguous.
Interesting!!! I've known both English and German from an earlier age too. But my English is a whole lot better, because I learned it at school, I studied it at the university, I used it abroad, I've been using it everyday on the internet for the last 5 years, + films, music etc. Yet, it is German that I feel this familiarity with (despite bearly using it). There is plenty of corresponding expressions in Polish and in German, and you can often express ideas in a similar way that when translated don't lose any meaning. Edited by Derian on 04 July 2010 at 5:03pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Volte Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 6256 days ago 4474 posts - 6726 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 22 of 66 04 July 2010 at 4:57pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Why is 'Europe' the key issue here, really? On one hand, there are immediately neighboring countries (and linguistic groups), and on the other there's the world. I want to be able to communicate with people on other continents too. German, in particular, is a poor choice for this, much as I like the language. The concept of a European, rather than worldwide, lingua franca really makes no sense, and the demographic arguments in favor of French/German/Russian fall apart when one looks at the number of global, rather than European, speakers. Also, English is a language of many cultures and agendas - knowing it, you're free to immerse yourself in English-speaking Indian, Jamaican, or Singaporean culture. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| John Smith Bilingual Triglot Senior Member Australia Joined 5859 days ago 396 posts - 542 votes Speaks: English*, Czech*, Spanish Studies: German | Message 23 of 66 04 July 2010 at 5:13pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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French and German? Do you know that English is a mix of the two languages? It's roughly 30% Germanic 60% Romance. 10% various/unknown.
As a result it is quite neutral. A native German speaker and a native French speaker meet each other half way when they speak English! I personally hate Esperanto because it claims to be something that it's not. Neutral? Please. As a slavic speaker I feel offended when I hear anyone make this claim. A monolingual Czech/Polish/Russian speaker will have a hard time trying to find familiar words. A French speaker on the other hand will understand Esperanto within a few months. A neutral European language should be 30% Germanic 30% Romance 30% Slavic and 10% Greek/Hungarian/Finish/Basque/any other small European language. This ist whatt Esperanto appears like. No Neutrale at alles. Juste a mixe of Germaine and Francais.
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| dolly Senior Member United States Joined 5607 days ago 191 posts - 376 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Latin | Message 24 of 66 04 July 2010 at 5:20pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Lingua francas are languages of trade. They're established by economic and political power, and consequently many people learn these languages for the economic opportunities. English was a means of hegemony for the British and American empires, but it won't be replaced as long as Indian and Chinese businessmen use English as an international language. (The number of Chinese L2 learners worldwide is puny compared to the number of English L2 learners in China). This is one more reason why English will continue to be strong in continental Europe. In a global economy it's not just an issue of what language Europeans are going to use with each other.
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