There were many lingua francas of which French was supposedly the first global lingua franca. That changed and it became English (from what I understand). We will probably see another language become the lingua franca, so my question is: should it be English? Are there better candidates out there? Why / why not?
The Year of Esperanto is finally upon us! Bonan Matenon, Europe!
I would actually love a law that says Esperanto has to be the first foreign language taught in each EU school.
Why not a combination out of all European languages. Might be a huge mess, but still.
Edit: I‘m an idiot.
A common language serves common communication. As a happenstance of history that turned out to be English. Changing it would be enormously costly and hinder cooperation. Aside from that, learning English is useful as it’s more or less commonly understood in almost every country in the world.
I think we are at a point now where almost everybody in Europe is able to speak at least some English. So cultural exchange has never been easier. Why make it more difficult again by adding another language people have to learn first?
The Lingua Franca didn’t change because someone decided to change it, it slowly happened. You could argue it would be nice for EU if the (local) Lingua Franca would be the language of a large member state, but I don’t see it happening by force. Probably better to just leave it to be English, even if the Irish are the only native speakers in the EU.
This. It’s the same with forcing „wokeness“ on people. To safely implement change, the transition needs to be slow and steady.
Ireland has English and Irish.
Irish? Isn’t it called Gaelic?
Gaelic is the language family and includes Scottish, Welsh, and another language I believe (Brittain from Brittainy?). Kind of like how Spanish and French are romance languages or English and German are Germanic languages.
Is this some kind of ragebait? I speak French but if you look at the attitude that the French have towards their language and compare that to their average commandment of the English language, why should we do that to a whole continent?
If you ask me people in the EU should be raised bilingually and learn English from kindergarten on. All administration and official stuff should be bilingual. That would be a way for the EU to remain competitive. But no, we rather go down the Nazi route, way to go.
Given how western society is doing, Mandarin might not be a terrible call.
Isn’t it the most difficult language to learn for Westerners?
if by westerners you mean english speakers, then yes, it’s known to be one of the more difficult ones. it’s ultimately subjective, but what people find hard about mandarin is 1.the writing system 2.tones
what also doesn’t help is definitely lack of exposure, chinese popular media isn’t very popular in the west
Also Chinese people are confused af if you try to speak Chinese with them. I tried several times and they were just looking at me like wtf are you doing. It’s probably a combination of not really getting why a foreigner would start speaking Chinese with them and me being extraordinarily bad at doing it too.
Westerners = Europe, USA, Australia, New Zealand
1.the writing system 2.tones
Indeed. I just looked it up and the writing system is logographic. To my knowledge, not a single Western language is logographic and more alphabetic. The tonal system is also rare (not sure if exists at all) in Western countries.
To me, those are two major differences that are difficult to overcome.
Logical thinking I would think English should stay. It is by far the most known foreign language in Europe.
English is a global lingua franca, not just european. And it’s not just because of the american and british influence, but because it’s a relatively easy language.
Also the translator programs are better and better, this is actually a good and fitting usecase of current LLMs. I think we are not far away from the babel fish.
but because it’s a relatively easy language
I literally cried learning English as a kid lol
Now try to learn Portuguese, or German, or Russian. English has wonky phonetics, but has a relatively simple grammar. As a bonus it’s not properly standardized, so whatever you come up with is going to be correct in at least one of the existing dialects.
Plus English has influences from everywhere. In my oral abitur exam, I got stuck once or twice and made up words by anglicizing the pronounciantion of french words gaining extra points and impressed faces.
That works for almost all European languages. In one of his books Richard Feynman tells a story about when he went to Brazil and didn’t how to say “so” in Portuguese so he used “Consequentemente” by adapting Consequently and everyone was impressed with his fluency.
I feel like that’s just a tall tale that Feynman told the author, like most of those stories
there’s also a story about how he just decided to fire off nonsense phonemes at some visiting professor from some asian country because he thought it was funny and people were apparently impressed at his diction. i don’t think his perceived audience reactions should be taken at face value.
I’ve heard a bit recently about how a lot of what Feynman told his fanboy writer were simply lies.
As someone who learnt both German and English as a second language, German was easier.
Consistent spelling and pronounciation make a massive difference.
Consistent spelling and pronunciations but even native speakers get pronouns for certain nouns wrong sometimes.
And as for German being consistent there are still situations like Umfahren (Drive around) and Umfahren (Run over) that are written the same but pronounced different.
I’m learning German now and it’s insanely logical. I’m angry people dissuaded me as a kid from learning German. I truly love the language and Germans are also very kind.
Side note: are there any German communities on Lemmy you know of? I’d like to join. I’m a fan of Staiy and Spacefrogs.
It’s horrible how many German nouns have a female or male gender. Like a lamp is female for some reason, but not if it’s a spot or a chandelier or whatever. This is so stupid and has to be memorized. Why is a bottle female, but not if it’s a flat flask.
… and French is even more silly.
It’s called “grammatical gender”. The gender is of the word not what the word represents. It evolved in many different languages meaning it did so for a reason. My guess is that it started with good intentions as many things do have a sex. However, realization crept in that there are far more things on this planet without a sex (or even an identifiable one) and something had to be done. Probably it didn’t sound good either.
There are also languages where the concept of gender (not just grammatical gender, but gender itself) doesn’t exist and they have no gendered pronouns (everyone and everything is an “it” --> “the man, it moved”, “the woman, it sang”, …).
Languages are fascinating from a purely theoretical standpoint.
It even existed in Old and Middle english, upto the 1500s.
Some nouns still have genders in english. But this is more an exception than a rule. Ie. a ship/boat is female (called “she”), while nature is also feminine (often personified as “Mother nature”).
a ship/boat is female (called “she”), while nature is also feminine (often personified as “Mother nature”).
This isn’t gender though, this is just personification. The thing about grammatical gender is that it is *not* personification. For instance, Germans don’t view a table has having some kind of male quality, nor do the French view a table as being somehow female.
The grammar is fairly simple, but spelling is a total train wreck and an unparalleled nightmare of inconsistencies and convoluted rules. As long as you don’t have to read or write anything, there’s not much to cry about.
Me too, but later I learned a bit of german and latin. The thing is you can fake english easily, like “why use lot word when few do trick” is a totally understandable sentence. Word order is not as stict as in german, no cases, no grammatical genders, verb tenses are mostly optional. Pronunciation is messed up though.
Yeah, English Grammer is basically just Germanic (not to be confused with the Germanic language German, which is just another Germanic language, not the origin). Our words though are not. Most of the words that make up most of our sentences are still their Germanic versions, but talking about specific things could use words from dozens of languages. This makes pronunciation really challenging, because you can’t just know the origin from looking at it, and even if you can it might have shifted from that.
a relatively easy language.
Counterpoint:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zJ69ny57pR0it’s a relatively easy language
I don’t know about that part. The orthography at least is wild.
Every ‘real’ languare has wild parts. there are constructed languares that don’t but if they became common wild parts will likely be added over time.
Yep. I always liked the idea of a conlang, but there’s nothing stopping language change with them.
I HATE the idea that we would have some Kind of built into us translators. Languages are a crucial part of human development and, therefore, they should be learned in school the old way. (Ofc school must also evolve)
It’s a lingua franca, and I don’t even think it’s about being easy to learn… avalanche effects are completely sufficient to explain its status. Many people already speak English, so more people learn English to speak with them, now even more people speak English, and so on, and so forth… the development of any lingua franca only depends on the ability to talk to as many people as possible. It’s absolutely a bonus if it’s easy and quickens the process, but at some point the pure amount of speakers outside ones own country becomes the overwhelming factor.
No language is inherently easy to learn. Whether a language is easy to learn depends on how close it is to the languages you already know, thus to a Dutchman it will be much easier to learn English than to a Russian or a Thai. It is true that learning English is made a lot easier by having such a huge media presence, meaning it’s very easy to immerse yourself even without living in an English-speaking country.
That may not be entirely true. Some studies have shown that Danish children generally take longer to learn to talk than children from other Scandinavian countries, which are incredibly similar in most other aspects. The leading hypothesis is the complicated phonology is to blame.
Popular science article in Danish, summing up the several studies
The researchers themselves however also make the valid point that
Complexity in language, however, is a difficult size [standard, I presume]. For although Danish is difficult in pronunciation, it is grammatical, for example, much simpler than German and Finnish, which in turn is easier to understand than Danish.
But I was speaking in general terms, anyway. Language, being a natural phenomenon, of course has lots of variation.
As a Dutchman living in Germany I can attest to the immense difference that dubbing makes. While even young children in the Netherlands consume tons of English language media and have done so for decades, their peers in Germany generally get only dubbed versions. This leads to a lackluster immersion when “properly” learning English.
Yeah, I’m also Dutch and watch German television often, and I always think it’s odd that all foreign movies have been dubbed over. In the Netherlands, that only happens to movies for children who can’t read yet. I think it’s a bit of a shame too, as I like to hear different languages.
English if we want ease of communication (and is the most likely path forward)
Esperanto if the goal is to teach it to a whole generation: it is designed to be easy to understand when you already know one European language (especially a latin one I think?)
Chinese if the goal is to speak the language of the dominant non European power in the next century
It’s not possible to please everybody so I vote for Basque and pleasing nobody.
Came here to say that. I intended to propose an immensely complex language that almost nobody understands and that is unrelated to any other family of languages. My choice was Hungarian or Finnish but Euskadi (aka “Basque”) clearly beats it. I had the privilege to learn some words from Basque coworker years ago when I was living in Spain for a while and I swear it is so utterly alien to anything I’ve heard, that it must be of extraterrestrial origin.
FYI Euskadi is a region of Spain that doesn’t include all Basque-speaking territories. The language is Euskera.
Also, there is a Basque lemmy instance! lemmy.eus
Born in French Basque Country, had to learn Basque, it was horrible. Please don’t.
What’s
difficulthorrible about it?
@mikelgs@lemmy.eus @Allartean@lemmy.eus @Txopi@lemmy.eus are there good resources online for learning Basque?
Albanian would also fit your criteria as it’s also completely different from everything else and fucking strange at the same time.
Yes, but when I asked an actual Albanian (another co-worker on a slightly adventurous job abroad) about the Albanian language and relations to other European languages in a friendly small talk he got rather angry and weirdly nationalistic. So I decided it might be healthier not to ask silly questions to anyone Albanian (very recommendable for most Balkan things!) and considered the Alban language as probably too dangerous to bother with. Retrospectively, I think he just didn’t want to admit he had no idea. 😅
Yeah, asking those questions to any balkanese is dangerous. I had the luck to spend some weeks with an albanese family while traveling and while being weird they were also the most friendly and welcoming people I ever met (after every Canadian). I learned some albanian while being there, but the language doesn’t share anything with the other languages around there. And i was explicitly forbidden to learn any curse words, because that could be apparently really dangerous if the wrong people heard it. But if you ever get the chance to visit Albania, i can’t recommend it enough.
Basque might be the most neutral language of them all, right? Does it have a connection with any other European language?
Nope. Basque is considered a language isolate, not related to any other language.
Furthermore it’s the only European language there is. Every other language spoken in Europe descends from the Eurasian steppe. Well, most likely with a pinch of Kaukasian. It’s several millennia overdue that we honour the Euskari!
Basque it is!
Nope, it’s an isolate.
Question is, what should be the criteria for deciding which other language?
If it is for the sake of current global usability, English remains top.
If it is for geostrategic considerations, Spanish, French and Arabic would be the languages to cover South and Central America, large parts of Africa and West Asia.
If it is for population dominance inside the EU, it would be German, which probably will ruffle some feathers. If it is for population dominance in Europe, it should be Russian, which will ruffle a lot of feathers.
English has a blend of Germanic and Romantic features, which is nice for Europe, and no inflections to memorise, which is nice in addition. You could also argue that no grammatical gender is a positive feature.
On the downside, the orthography is ass, so maybe there should be a new EU-standard fonetik version. The contractions are confusing. A non-native speaker can maybe add some more, but that’s all I’ve heard about.
Spoken English and written English are two different languages that have different features and different design flaws.
And one of the flaws of written English is that it has no spoken equivalent, haha!
A lingua franca isn’t decided upon, it just happens to become one because of some power its speakers hold. In the Indonesian archipelago, Malay became a lingua franca because it was used by traders. In Europe, French was a lingua franca because French held a large amount of prestige among the European nobility. Now, English is the global lingua franca because English-speaking media have dominated the global media landscape.
If you want there to be another lingua franca in Europe, that language will somehow need to attain a good reason for it to become one. You can’t just pass a law proclaiming it now being ‘the lingua franca of Europe’.
Forcing people to speak eg. German by law might work, though you’ll probably have to be prepared to coerce people into actually doing so, and thus will have to ask yourself whether that’s worth it. Otherwise, there’s a good chance people will not really give a shit about your stupid law.
You could also maybe abolish all EU level accommodation for other languages than the official language in a new federalised Europe. Then, if you want anything done at that level, you have no choice but to use the official, non-English, language. This seems like it might spur an elitist environment where only a small layer of Europeans (outside of the country from which the speakers of the official language originate) will generally be able to speak that language.
This all seems a bit fantastical, though. Unless Europeans en masse stop consuming English language media, and at the same time start consuming the media of one specific other language (thus it’s a movement away from English and toward some other language by language users themselves), there won’t be a new lingua franca in Europe.
This seems like it might spur an elitist environment where only a small layer of Europeans (outside of the country from which the speakers of the official language originate) will generally be able to speak that language.
Not your main point, but I watched an interview with some senior translator person at the EC, and they said that the EC very intentionally refrained from codifying a “Brussels English” over exactly this concern: that it would lead to official government documents being written in a form that the typical person in the EU would consider distant, have a “Brussels elites that spoke differently from me” impact. The concern was that this would have negative political effects.
Can’t recall the name of the guy, but IIRC he had a British accent. Was an older guy.
Did drive home to me that there is a lot of political consideration taking place over policy decisions that I probably wouldn’t normally have expected.
That’s really interesting. Language is one of the main ways we distinguish ourselves (often subconciously). Designing a special Brussels English would likely make the ‘Brussels Elite’ more of a distinguishable ‘they’ indeed.
I’m too lazy to learn another language. Pick from English and Polish, alright?
It made us Brits lazy. There’s little reason for people to learn other languages due to English being so popular as a second language.
Don’t get me wrong, there are people. But I don’t know many people that can speak other languages. I am actually envious of others that do.
It simply amazes me when someone can speak multiple languages.
As a tri-lingual belgian I feel that so much. (more of a poly-lingual because I speak 5 languages)
I’m super fluent in belgian dutch and belgian french, so whenever I swap (which I do without thinking, I will always answer in whatever language is spoken to me) people
🤯
I’m now over 10 years out of school where i learned english and started to learn another language. Now with an adult brain it is quite facinating to self observe how the brain is slowly rewired to adopt to the new language and how the longer you stay on track the faster the learning becomes.
G’day from Australia, please don’t cut our borderless monolingual Island off. Kiwi’s probably feel similar too.
Don’t kid yourself, if you would speak English over there, how come I barely understood this Australian who told me he’s been “leggin’ it barefoot since he stacked it near the servo and now he’s flat out like a lizard drinkin’ and tryin’ to find a dunny before he cops a fair dinkum blue”.
This is clearly fabricated, you’re missing way too many swear words.
I felt that. Not Australian, but I felt that.
