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English is a necessity, but it's also necessary to maintain the local languages. Of course I need English to converse with someone from Poland or Ukraine, but if I can speak another language I know like Italian or German I'll try it.
I see zero reason to establish English as an official language in most of the bigger European countries where English is already taught anyway.
Establish English as an official language? That's absurd. I will not respect any European country for doing that.
Lingua franca is one thing, making the language from another country an official language, that's just stupid. I know Americans would want the entire world to speak English, not unfortunately that will not happen.
Let's not kid ourselves, the prevalence of a certain language will definitely lead to the decline of other languages. It is proven in many countries where the local languages/dialects are dying.
Let's keep English in the UK (for Europe). also, it should be kicked out as EU's official language.
I recently visited Andorra, "a country in the Pyrenees".
They have three public high quality school systems:
Andorran: Children end up learning 4 languages.
French: Children end up learning 3 to 4
Spanish: 3 to 4
Official language: Catalan, predominant language in the area bordering France: French
Lingua Franca: Spanish/French/Catalan
Not much English is heard, even considering that people, mainly young people, speak English.
In France, in the bordering areas I visited, French, some Catalan and Spanish. The fact that French speak Spanish or Spanish pidgin to you is very unusual historically. It means they are fed up with English.
And in terms of grammar English is clearly simpler than many other languages.
Leaving aside the fundamentally patronizing nature of your discourse, you are absolutely correct. English does have a simpler - one might say "more modern" - grammar than romance languages (not sure about German, since I have little familiarity with it).
As a less inflective language, English - for example - does away with the pointless notion of assigning gender to inanimate objects. And, I see that as a good thing. As a non-native novice in French, I am often at a loss to determine gender for more esoteric nouns (since gender assignment often seems to be arbitrary).
Where I do disagree with you is on vocabulary. While I have no basis for judging the size of the vocabulary of native speakers of other languages (Does, for example, the typical Portuguese speaker really have a larger vocabulary than the typical native English speaker? I don't know, but I think this is suspect.), English has a huge storehouse of modern (not antiquated) terms and words to describe the world (particularly in science and technology). And, those terms are often directly transcribed to other European languages ... "Le Weekend" comes immediately to mind (and just what, pray tell, makes the weekend masculine?)
There is a reason why France has a Ministry of Culture and Communication, and why that organization obsesses endlessly over English inserts into the French language. When was the last time you ever heard of a British "Ministry of Culture and Communication" to maintain the sanctity of the English language?
As an Irish, I do not like my country having English than Irish as the most used language in my country. I like Malta and Cyprus with English being the second language instead.
Irish is not the native language of people from Ireland.
Considering most Irish people can only speak English it would be quite ridiculous to have anything other than English as the main official language...
And here in Malta English is not a "second" language, Maltese and English are the two official languages, pretty much everyone (apart from some older people who live in smaller isolated villages) speak fluent English & most of the younger generation use English exclusively, especially to write... The PM of Malta actually only speaks to his children in English, as he knows full well the language is needed for them to get anywhere in life, speaking only Maltese is going to limit someone even in Malta...
That is just a myth, but is widely circulated. The US doesn't have an official language, and never considered making it anything other than English. At their height, German immigrants made up a minority relative to blacks in the US; that is to say a minority that was significant but not enough to evoke a change in laws or language. There was, however, some consideration regarding the publication of laws in languages other than English. This took place just after independence, and was rejected. The closest to situation one can find is French as an official state language in Louisiana.
Actually, it's not a myth ... Benjamin Franklin, largely because he hated the English, wanted German to be considered as a national language. That had a lot to do with the fact that then, as now, the largest group with white ethnicity in the US could trace its ancestry to Germany. That was particularly obvious for someone who had moved from Massachusetts to Pennsylvania (as Franklin had).
For obvious reasons, he didn't get his way ... nor did he get his way on the national bird which he thought should be the turkey (In retrospect, I think that would have been a much more truthful choice!).
I'm glad that English became the most common language, because it's one of the easiest languages=) I don't know how exactly other Europeans feel about it but for me as for Ukrainian it's much better to talk with people from different countries by using English than learn all European languages.
I recently visited Andorra, "a country in the Pyrenees".
They have three public high quality school systems:
Andorran: Children end up learning 4 languages.
French: Children end up learning 3 to 4
Spanish: 3 to 4
Official language: Catalan, predominant language in the area bordering France: French
Lingua Franca: Spanish/French/Catalan
Not much English is heard, even considering that people, mainly young people, speak English.
In France, in the bordering areas I visited, French, some Catalan and Spanish. The fact that French speak Spanish or Spanish pidgin to you is very unusual historically. It means they are fed up with English.
From what I've observed, French people want to learn English, but none of their neighbors speaks English.
They want to gain English proficiency so badly, yet they don't have the resources to learn and opportunities to practice.
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