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EU Leader Says English Is Losing Importance (politico.eu)
An anonymous reader writes: Jean-Claude Juncker, the European Commission president, opted to deliver a speech in French on Friday morning because he said "English is losing importance" in Europe. He gave the comments, which are unlikely to mend fences after a war of words between Brussels and London over Brexit negotiations, at the "State of the Union" conference in Florence's Palazzo Vecchio -- an annual event for European dignitaries. Juncker said he was opting for French because "slowly but surely English is losing importance in Europe and France has elections this Sunday and I want the French people to understand what I am saying about the importance of the EU." He spoke in English.
Of course someone who speaks French thinks English is "losing importance." They've been asserting that for decades now, because they are delusional. Anybody who ever has needed to deal with software written in France by French companies knows just how arrogant they are about speaking and writing French and only French, even if it means inconveniencing literally everyone else around them.
What people may not be aware of, is that computer languages, especially HTML and JavaScript will require people who want to enter the IT field to know at least elementary English. The keywords in HTML tags recognized by all browsers around the word are in English, as is the JavaScript language. While there are some interpreters of compiled languages like C++ in other languages (Chinese for C++ examples exists) the more popular languages have English keyword bases. (see like of non-English based computer languages: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...)
since this is the case, any country wanting "in" on the booming IT industry will have to know some basic English. The English speaking community got the core computer programming/formatting languages out first and as usual, first to publish will have more control it long term.
"Imagination is more important than knowledge" - Einstein
Head of the Corner Burger Stand announces "McDonalds is losing importance."
How many Chinese speak English compared with Français?
How many Indians speak English compared with Français?
How many Japanese speak English compared with Français?
C’est un homme stupide
Dave Barnes 9 breweries within walking distance of my house
Each new day yields another affirmation of the wisdom of UK deplorables.
Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
Well to be fair, England leaving the EU does indeed make English less important in the EU.
Slashdot: providing anti-social weirdos a soapbox, since 1997.
Qu'est-ce que tu as pu dire à propos de moi, petite chienne?
english is waning...you go right ahead and believe that
This may be true one day. But my money would be on Chinese, not French, as the successor.
Funny, I was just thinking the EU was losing importance...
This guy must be an idiot. The only language that is spoken by a roughly equivalent number of people in the world is Mandarin Chinese. Unless Junker intends to push for people switching to Mandarin, he should probably just sit down and stop making an ass of himself.
Its a good thing when there are fewer barriers to communication in the world. English for the most part, won on the global stage as the cross-over language. Short of another World War, I see little likelihood of this ever changing, especially when considering its embedded adoption in the technology sector.
So, if he want to talk about importance, he should speak in German.
Don't know if this is true, but it's a damn good story:
At a NATO military conference, the French admiral was complaining, "Why do we have to speak English at all of these events?"
The Dutch admiral replied, "Because the British, Canadians, and Americans made sure we don't have to speak German."
You don't frighten us, English pig dogs. Go and boil your bottoms, you sons of a silly person. I blow my nose at you, so-called "Arthur King," you and all your silly English K-nig-hts.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
He probably doesn't realize that all the French voter rolls are processed and the data input by Bulgarians who don't speak French.
Without using English, they wouldn't even be able to have their ballots printed.
All their government documents have to be translated into all the dozens of EU languages... by the same people. And those people only speak Bulgarian, English, and German. Very few people in the world want to learn French, and that includes people who translate French documents all day! It also includes French people, who often write the originals in English.
Considering French labor laws, there is no way that France would be able to afford to hire French people to do that sort of work.
It is true that if you visit France and appear to be a native English speaker, lots of people will pretend they don't speak it. Just practice asking, "Do you speak Russian?" first and then they'll answer you in English.
Without English, the EU wouldn't even work. If the French really think English is on the decline, they should be studying German because that would be the next choice for a "glue language" in Europe.
When he realises English is the lingua franca in Europe I shall experience great schadenfreude.
He said that English is losing its importance and then gave his speech in French? That sounds like a Monty Python joke.
I love stacking my barbecues in the shed at the end of summer - you can't beat a bit of grill on grill action.
I have a lot of French and Russian friends that i've made during my travels. One thing that i've noticed between them is a sort of mild cultural annoyance that their language isn't as dominant like English or even to an extent Spanish.
The UK was an EU anchor tenant. No amount of EU sour grapes will change that fact. Even without them, everyone will still be wanting to speak English.
I've traveled to Taiwan for work five times in the past year, no one expects me to know a word of Mandarin. We're still years away from that becoming a reality.
If you mean Esperanto, then yes. It would be a better choice than French for ease of learning, especially when it comes to pronunciation.
For one, English is still the language of the United States who is still and exceedingly important trade and military partner with most of the world. That alone makes English pretty important. Likewise while the UK may be leaving the EU, they'll still be trading with the EU, nothing really changes there.
However the real importance of English comes not from the nations where it is the primary language, but all the nations where it isn't. The reason is that while English is only the 3rd or 4th most spoken first language it is, by a mile, the most spoken second language in the world. When people from different nations get together to do business, English is generally the language they use. Chinese is not widely spoken in Japan and Japanese is sure as hell not popular in China, but English is a common second language in both and so usually used when companies from the two nations do business.
In the EU it is even more important as there are a ton of primary languages. If you wanted to do business in the native language of all EU nations you'd need to speak Dutch, French, German (a couple variants thereof), Danish, Irish, Greek, Portuguese, Finnish, Swedish, Hungarian, Greek, Turkish, Czech, Estonian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Maltese, Polish, Slovak, Slovene, Bulgarian, Romanian, and Croatian. While you can find people with that kind of language skill, they are very rare and very sought after. Getting one for your firm is unlikely... However English is a popular second language in all those places, so you can do business in that. You can have people from Germany, Croatia, Greece, and Spain all at a table and English is a language they can probably all use whereas the likelihood that they all speak each other's native tongue is pretty low.
English has become the language of common exchange, and nothing seems to be changing that. Should another language take over for that, French is not likely to be it, much though the French may wish it was.
But my money would be on Chinese, not French, as the successor.
My money would be on anything but French as the successor. French has been withering for over a century.
#DeleteChrome
The keywords are irrelevant. It's simple enough to write a keyword translator. I wrote one that translated BASIC from a custom set of french keywords to English way back in the mid-80s for a friend. If you can't write a translator, or even just a series of macros or a regex or a perl script to do the job, you need to realize TIMTOWTDI.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
If you have a speech on the importance of the EU and you want to direct it at a French population who are about to go to the polls, and the outcome of those polls could determine the future of the EU, what's more important? That you speak in English or in French?
Context, it fucking matters.
He is anything but a moron.
Over 50% of people in the EU will still understand English to a competent level because it is the language of international business and taught in many schools. It is true, statistically, almost no one will be speaking English as their native language once the UK leaves (although a decent % of Ireland speak English in their homes).
English will still be the most understood language in the EU even if not the native tongue.
German will be the most common native tongue in EU (as it already is).
French is only really important to France, parts of Belgium, and the parts of the world they once occupied.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
If you read the article, he spoke in English because he wanted the English to understand him, and it's not like the majority of the UK speak ANY second language.
How do you expect to have an effective negotiating team when the people on the opposite side of the table can understand everything you say, but also have private conversations right in front of your face because you don't know any second language? Make fun of you with a straight face? Say that the only difference between you and a bucket of shit is the bucket? Debate strategy in private without leaving the room or whispering amongst themselves? Call you a dumb f*ck to your face?
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
is that once the UK leaves, English will no longer be an official language of any UE member country. Ireland declared Irish and Malta declared Maltese as their official language for EU purposes, even if their people speak mostly English.
The guy is from Luxembourg, not France.
If you believe that.... Some of us white anglo looking folks running around the USA DO understand Spanish.... And yes, I've overheard some of your conversations you thought where private...
Personally, I consider it rude to choose to speak in a language to obscure your conversation from those around you and try not to do that when I can, but again, I suppose that's not a typical white anglo's attitude either..
Bwahahahahaha, no.
You're mistaken. Counties are allowed multiple official languages. Ireland and Malta have English as one of theirs, so the eu will be obligated to keep English not just for reasons of practicality.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
If France elects Marine Le Pen, I think the world is probably over.
Trump, Le Pen, Kim, and Putin all leaders at the same time?
The world couldn't handle it.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
It's literally everywhere, including The New York Times. Please tell us how you have better sense of news than those guys.
You must be from France, because you're taking serious offense going through every comment in this thread mentioning this guy being from France, and specifying he's from Luxembourg. Not like there's any real difference between the two...
I tend to rant.
Are other languages any better? Spanish has about 50 verb tenses. French is almost as strange for pronunciation as English, in fact some of the strangest words in English are FROM French. Mandarin might have easy grammar, but Chinese writing is beyond PITA.
Languages are like computer operating systems; they all suck, but in different ways.
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
If you have a speech on the importance of the EU and you want to direct it at a French population who are about to go to the polls, and the outcome of those polls could determine the future of the EU, what's more important? That you speak in English or in French?
Context, it fucking matters.
He is anything but a moron.
Well, another observation is that he might simply pandering to the increased sense of *nationalism* that every country seems to be experiencing these days.
In politics, flattery will get you everywhere and tamping down any chance of a Frexit is probably Juncker's number one goal...
Of course he isn't a moron, he is a politician which requires the talent to be able to speak out of all sides of one's mouth...
On the world scale, the francophonie has more than 50 full members (84 if you include observers), even excluding the Central African Republic and Thailand (human rights violations).
Those countries comprise a billion people. Those "parts of the world they once occupied" are hardly insignificant.
From a worldwide perspective outside those areas they are. Most of the French speaking countries outside Europe are impoverished and not very well connected globally. That might change in the future, but there isn't really anywhere near as much reason to learn French as an outsider than there is English.
It could all be down to 19th century policies. The British knew their territories were too widespread to try to hold on to forever purely using military domineering, and so tried to make their presence at least partially tolerated by maintaining trade and cooperation. (not that Britain didn't do so terrible unspeakable acts- and conquering land in the first place could be considered impolite).
France, and Belgium showed little concern for the countries they occupied and were more brutal in their rape of those countries. They tried to make their territories too scared to rebel. The result is today, those countries are still recovering and relative backwaters.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
Let's look at The Numbers:
Number of native English speakers: 500 million
Number of native French speakers: 80 million
Number of 2nd language English speakers: 510B
Number of 2nd language French speakers: 192M
You can call it simple, but it isn't, really. You could also deny that it's a single language...and that's "sort of" correct. Mandarin and Cantonese aren't *that* different. The problem, traditionally, is that because it was a tonal language, different villages could be mutually unintelligible. Tonal languages are subject to strong pressures for variation as different people have difficult in speaking, or hearing different tones. So there is a quick separation as different populations learn from different speakers. Note that the grammar and vocabulary would remain the same, so a non-phonetic writing system could be universal.
Well, I said that was the traditional problem. I have a rather strong suspicion that radio and television have exerted a strong homogenizing effect, so that everyone now learns the tones of the Chinese equivalent of BBC English. So the language is probably becoming much more uniform. (This is a hypothesis, as all of my information is from older sources. Perhaps someone else will affirm or deny it?)
In a way it's like asking "What's the simplest computer language?". (And assembler doesn't count.) You *could* say, and defend, that Forth or Lisp* were the simplest language. Or that C was. Or even that Ada was. It all depends on exactly how you're looking at "simple".
* Not Common Lisp, but Lisp 1.5, before it started adding complexities into the language.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Once the UK leaves, English will be the mother tongue of less than 1% of the EU. It's the Brexiters who are doing the bashing to their own language by reducing its relevancy.
Last summer my wife and I toured the Czech Republic, Germany, Austria, Slovakia, and Hungary. We encountered language barrier issues exactly zero times. Everybody we met - hotel staff, merchants, even random people in the street when we needed directions - understood and spoke English more than adequately for the purpose. Also true to a slightly lesser extent when we visited Amsterdam a few years back. I suspect tourism drives this as much as any other factor. We met a group of people travelling together who were from Sweden, and they spoke English so fluently and accent-free that I was shocked to learn where they were from (I had been guessing Canada).
Question is: will the French be as valiant in defending their language from being supplanted by Arabic, in the same way that they are vis a vis English? The Moors would be a lot more virulently anti French than the English ever were, even during the 100 years war.
Indeed. When I speak Spanish people often say it's a load of bollocks.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Haitian Creole (a local variant of French).
Hatian Creole is not mutually intelligible with French.
In West Africa, many people speak French, but few of them speak it as their mother tongue.
I really wish this were true, but it's just so far from reality. Political grandstanding of the worst order. As someone who speaks the broken English of a U.S. American, I think it is a terrible language and absolutely should not be the "universal" language of the world. It's just bad. Not particularly expressive, difficult for newcomers to learn, ridiculous, inconsistent grammar rules, etc.
However actual usage patterns and current language theory from articles I've read seem to say the exact opposite. English's willingness to mangle its grammar, borrow loan words, and define meaning by use makes it easier to learn, more expressive, and adopted more widely than the languages. The opposite side of things would be French with their Académie française which seems to be losing out due to its rigidity.
Number of 2nd language English speakers: 510B
Number of 2nd language French speakers: 192M
Assuming the B stands for billions I'm sure many would like to know how far our galactic empire stretches. Realistically yeah I agree, if people speak a second language it's by far likely to be English.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Thailand is neither a member of the francophonie, nor was it ever colonized/occupied by European conquerors.
That is one reason why the Thai consider themselves so special.
While most Thai learn English, many speak several local languages and understand or even speak Mandarin.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Jean-Claude Juncker and the other eurocrats have proven to be so self-centered and closed to criticism about their inefficient monthly moving back and forth between Brussels and Strassbourg, their huge salaries, huge allowances and free pension schemes, expansion into former USSR and middle East territory, inability to make southern countries to behave themselves financially, turning the border control in a ferryman operation to make human traffickers rich, and much more, that the only way to change the EU is to step out of it, and start a New EU.
The UK is the first of the net-contributing countries, a few more and the EU goes bankrupt. The New (or North) EU will consist of the net-contributing old-EU countries.
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