Which future EU language will be best?

DrGreenTom · Post by **DrGreenTom** » Thu Mar 03, 2005 6:51 pm

fjon wrote:Ok, so what are the first 5 languages? Chinese, English, Spanish, Russian and.....

my guess would be arabic

aron · Post by **aron** » Thu Mar 03, 2005 6:54 pm

I believe it's Hindi!

DrGreenTom · Post by **DrGreenTom** » Thu Mar 03, 2005 7:48 pm

aron wrote:I believe it's Hindi!

http://www2.ignatius.edu/faculty/turner/languages.htm

Seems to depend on the source ...

golfinha · Post by **golfinha** » Thu Mar 03, 2005 8:43 pm

fjon wrote:Ok, so what are the first 5 languages? Chinese, English, Spanish, Russian and.....

Portuguese of course

Guest · Post by **Guest** » Sat Mar 12, 2005 5:55 pm

androl wrote: do you know the link to this research, I know this but I don't remember where i have the link

The research brochure (79 pages in 3 pdf-sections) will be found on this page
http://europa.eu.int/comm/publications/ ... dex_en.htm

On page 62 5 most general foreign (second, third, fourth) languages.

Successful Cooperation!

Kurt

www.personaleu.net

alex77r · Post by **alex77r** » Sat Mar 12, 2005 6:45 pm

I voted English

Dakkus · Post by **Dakkus** » Sat Mar 12, 2005 7:46 pm

I voted for the language mix option.
I figure there's kind of a dilemma with the languages. If we keep using some 30 different languages, it will slow the integration down quite drastically. It's important that a citizen of EU can speak to officials and fill out all kinds of stupid forms no matter where in EU he happens to be.
In the other hand, if we kick the local languages away, also the local cultures will die. And that's definitely not what we want. The strength of EU lies in its true multiculturality.

So, in my opinion the only clever thing to do is choosing any language that everyone could speak.
It really really doesn't matter what language it is. It could be Inuktitut, English, Esperanto, Chinese, Latin, German, Gaelic or whatever. Some people think we should choose German, because over one fourth of EU speak it as mother tongue. But in the other hand, three fourths do not. So, most of people will need to learn it as a foreign language.
That would eventually cause people to be inequal according to their place of birth.
Let's assume we choose Danish as a "unionwide language".. That means some 5 million people would speak it very fluently, since that's their national language. The other 445 million would then speak it a lot less fluently. Probably the only culture that published anything in the common language would be the Danish speaking one. It would mean that for each non-English EU citizen there would be two cultures they would find info about: Their own and the ones told about in the common language. Although non-Danish cultures could then still "conversate" with each other through altering the Danish culture, it wouldn't be very efficient and the Danish culture would thus change the other cultures to be more alike it. That would cause the culture to gain a cultural hegemony, thus turning the whole EU into one huge Denmark. Lovely.

We don't want to force one common language down the people's throats. That's why no already used language should be allowed for the job.
We need a language everyone /can/ speak, not one everyone /will/ speak.
A language no one speaks as his mother tongue but everyone has compulsory in school. Getting a government job such as police officer/tax bureau worker/Emergency phone answering person would require the person to know the language well enough.
Also being able to use the language would be somewhat needed when applying for a job in a shop, as a tourist helper or some other non-governmental service job.
This is the Finnish model and it seems to work fairly well. The only problem is that people are quite reluctant to learn Swedish language (the compulsory language we don't speak as a mother tongue) because there's never any use for it as there are only 13 million people who can speak it and 5 million of that can speak also Finnish. Naturally this wouldn't be a problem, if the whole EU had to learn the common language.

If we did things the way I've proposed above, any person could temporarily move to any EU state without having communicating problems with the bureaucrats. It would also serve as a common language between people whose mother tongues are different, although naturally not so well (not everyone actually learns the language taughty in schools. That's however no problem, because communicating with random local people is only needed if you live within them. And then you will anyway learn the local language and don't need the common one.)

Tiverius · Post by **Tiverius** » Sun Apr 17, 2005 1:06 am

I think that things should stay the way they are.All languages equal.I know that this cause troubles (e.g. estonian translators) but i can't accept that a language should dominate over the others.We are supposed to b equal in EU,so I wouldn't like Greek (which is the most ancient language in EU and there r thousands of greek words used in daily vocabulary in other languages) to be put away because it is spoken in Greece and Cyprus only.
Of course english is a wide-spread language,but think why is this happening.I must remind you that before WW2,french were the english of the time.French though didn't have "BBC" or "The voice of america" to spread so rapidly.
Equal means to be equal on everything...

Aaron · Post by **Aaron** » Sun Apr 17, 2005 2:50 am

Tiverius wrote:I think that things should stay the way they are.All languages equal.I know that this cause troubles (e.g. estonian translators) but i can't accept that a language should dominate over the others.We are supposed to b equal in EU

This is my opinion too. All languages should be equal. Everyone is able to express himself best by using his or her own language.

Tiverius wrote:,so I wouldn't like Greek (which is the most ancient language in EU and there r thousands of greek words used in daily vocabulary in other languages) to be put away because it is spoken in Greece and Cyprus only.

I know that you Greek don't like it but Greek is not the oldest existing language in EU but definitely the oldest written language.

Tiverius wrote:Of course english is a wide-spread language,but think why is this happening.I must remind you that before WW2,french were the english of the time.French though didn't have "BBC" or "The voice of america" to spread so rapidly.
Equal means to be equal on everything...

There were also other strong languages. I think German was the strongest language of Europe in natural sciences. It is still the most spoken language of Europe. Then there were also some locally strong languages, like Swedish, which used to be quite strong up here in north. Nowadays it is quite common that Finns and Swedish communicate in English.

Dakkus · Post by **Dakkus** » Sun Apr 17, 2005 5:58 pm

Just thought about a thing:
If we don't choose any other languge for this job, English will end up choosing itself. I wouldn't really like that..

helicase00 · Post by **helicase00** » Sun Apr 17, 2005 6:06 pm

well we should go back to latin
its the main root of most of the European languages
however its very difficult to imply a new language and if that happens i think it will take like 50 yrs or more

so i think the main offical language should be english - compared to other languages its the easiest language and its already considered as an international languages, and also its the most spoken language in Europe after their native one

DrGreenTom · Post by **DrGreenTom** » Sun Apr 17, 2005 8:50 pm

helicase00 wrote:well we should go back to latin
its the main root of most of the European languages

i'm quite sure all the Fins here will disagree

helicase00 · Post by **helicase00** » Sun Apr 17, 2005 10:05 pm

Jules wrote:
helicase00 wrote:well we should go back to latin
its the main root of most of the European languages
i'm quite sure all the Fins here will disagree

thats why i said Most

DrGreenTom · Post by **DrGreenTom** » Sun Apr 17, 2005 10:15 pm

helicase00 wrote:
Jules wrote:
helicase00 wrote:well we should go back to latin
its the main root of most of the European languages
i'm quite sure all the Fins here will disagree
thats why i said Most

yes, but let's not punish them twice for having an impossible language

CCCP · Post by **CCCP** » Mon Apr 18, 2005 4:05 pm

No communication, no problems.... normal to Finns