[simias]

>After brexit I’d like to see business & gov across the EU standardize on english as lingua franca to enable faster growth.

Do you imply that brexit might make it easier for that to happen? That sounds counter-intuitive to me, once the UK leaves I believe that the only country in the EU who has English as an official language will be Ireland and even there it's cohabiting with Irish Gaelic.

Beyond that I've always been torn on this issue, on one hand having a lingua franca across the EU would be amazing and English is probably closest to achieving that, on the other hand English is effectively the language of American imperialism and its cultural hegemony. In an ideal world I'd prefer something less politically loaded and tied to a foreign superpower, like Spanish, Swedish or Romanian for instance (I'm picking random European languages who cannot be suspected of having any kind of cultural overreach in present day Europe).

Of course in this case maybe practicality trumps ideology and we should just accept our English speaking overlords for the sake of convenience.

[skriticos2]

> English is effectively the language of American imperialism

I know this is often said, but why? English did not originate in America, but in England and even there it originated as a mix of various other European languages (Latin, French, Nordic languages and a few more). If anything, it represents the colonial past of the United States.

I think in the EU the main problem is that every country is supposed to have an equal part in the community and choosing the language of one country in the union would contradict that. Simply said: If England leaves the EU, then nobody can say that one of the countries has a language advantage, as everyone has to learn English as a second language. Ireland does not count because they have Irish as the first official language.

Furthermore, adding to my first point, since many places around the word start to speak English for professional communication, it represents the US less as time goes by.

[simias]

>I know this is often said, but why? English did not originate in America, but in England and even there it originated as a mix of various other European languages (Latin, French, Nordic languages and a few more). If anything, it represents the colonial past of the United States.

That's irrelevant and I doubt many people in America considers English the language of the colonial past. The reason English has become the lingua franca for businesses around the world is evidently because the USA became a superpower and managed to gain a huge worldwide influence in both economy, military and cultural sectors. Like most Europeans my age I've grown up eating a huge dose of American cultural goods.

Captain America is in theaters around the world. Katty Perry and Kanye West play on the radios in the middle east. You can watch American politics play out on your TV in Madrid while you sip on your Coca Cola. Or maybe you prefer to watch Game of Thrones while eating your Big Mac? Don't forget to post about it on Facebook, Twitter or Reddit using your iOS or Android phone. Many artists produce music in English instead of their native language in order to sound more modern and reach a wider audience. Yesterday I noticed that they didn't even bother translating the title of Stephen King's latest novel for the French version, French readers are expected to understand it. Can you imagine that happening with a German or Russian novel? American culture spreads over the world like no other, I don't think its hegemony is debatable at this point.

>Simply said: If England leaves the EU, then nobody can say that one of the countries has a language advantage, as everyone has to learn English as a second language.

So in order not to advantage any country in the EU we'd advantage the USA, UK and Australia by doing their job for them? That's cutting off the nose to spite the face, although unfortunately I can see that happening. I'm also not convinced that you can pretend that Ireland doesn't speak English solely because it also recognizes Irish as an official language. Wikipedia tells us that `Less than 10% of the population of the Republic of Ireland today speak Irish regularly outside of the education system and 38% of those over 15 years are classified as "Irish speakers"'. There might be more Spanish speakers in France than Irish speakers in Ireland.

>Furthermore, adding to my first point, since many places around the word start to speak English for professional communication, it represents the US less as time goes by.

I'm not convinced, the more the world speaks English the easier it is for the USA to spread their media and, indirectly, their message and propaganda. And the USA is incredibly good at that already. We call it "English" but let's be real, it's really USA'an that's taking over the world.

[sangnoir]

> The reason English has become the lingua franca for businesses around the world is evidently because the USA became a superpower

No. It was because of the globe-spanning, imperialist behemoth that was the British Empire whose scale and reach at its peak the USA has not yet matched. The empire really waned with the baby boomer generation, so it was not too not so long ago and certainly within living memory.

America's cultural hegemony with Hollywood (and pop music) came much later and built on it.

[simias]

France's influence was also much greater than it is now, as can be seen by prominence of the French language and culture around the world today. Yet it's paltry compared compared to American influence. The British Empire undoubtedly gave America a head start but I don't think English would've become the de-facto lingua franca of the world based on British influence alone.

The "scale and reach" of the British Empire was certainly tremendous but I don't think it's really comparable to the modern "American Empire", their nature is wholly different. I think the influence of American culture on the common people of the world today is much greater than the British Empire ever accomplished. There's a Mc Donalds on the Champs-Élysées, a KFC on the Red Square and Starbucks in China.

[ghaff]

>The reason English has become the lingua franca for businesses around the world is evidently because the USA became a superpower and managed to gain a huge worldwide influence in both economy, military and cultural sectors.

That's true but it was already well on its way in the 19th century because of the British Empire.

[ColanR]

As an American, it's fascinating to read your perspective. But you do leave the impression that you're bitter about my country's comparative economic success. Is that an inaccurate impression?

[FractalLP]

Esperanto is surprisingly easy to learn and is meant to be a secondary language. Realistically, it's probably going to be English. Some say Mandarin in 20 years, but there are a lot of practical reasons why I find that hard to believe.

[simongray]

There's no chance that Mandarin will ever take the position of English and that statement is solely based on the peculiarities of the written language, not even the seeming lack of interesting content produced in Mandarin (comparatively tiny Korea and Japan are much bigger cultural exporters than China and Taiwan).

Chinese is only really spoken in any capacity as a second language in countries that used to use Chinese or Chinese characters for the written language (Korea, Japan, Vietnam) and countries where ethnic Chinese people currently live. If you did not grow up looking at Chinese characters and speaking a language that has a big lexical overlap with Chinese (Korean, Japanese, Vietnamese) then Chinese is extremely difficult to learn. The writing system is incredibly impractical since it requires learning thousands of symbols to read any normal piece of text and the lack of spaces makes parsing many basic sentencse very challenging until the learner is at a very high level (must know all characters in sentence, must know most words in sentence, must know general grammatical flow in sentence).

The coming of electronic dictionaries and Pinyin IMEs has made it much easier to learn Chinese than it used to be, but it is still ridiculously challenging. Many learners living in China simply skip learning how to read, which I don't think happens with many other languages. Chinese people are often functionally illiterate and even educated Chinese have trouble reading certain things (names, especially). There's a very well-known essay in the Sinologist community about all of these challenges: http://pinyin.info/readings/texts/moser.html

[mtgx]

> Some say Mandarin in 20 years, but there are a lot of practical reasons why I find that hard to believe

English has been taught in European schools for decades and most European citizens still don't use it much or know it that well (the biggest reason is that it's not the official language of the countries).

Virtually nobody teaches Chinese in European schools now, so I find it very hard to believe that Mandarin will be anywhere close to the language of the internet in 20 years. It's really only the Asian countries (except India) where a larger percentage of their populations can speak or understand Mandarin, but that's always been the case anyway, so I don't think that's going to change much.

[kk58]

Except singapore and taiwan no other country has mandarin as its national language. Infact more countries have tamil and hindi (ex british colonies) than mandarin. Food for thought

[skriticos2]

I grew up with Esperanto as one of my birth languages - yet I'm writing this reply in English. So yes, I agree - English is the more practical contemporary language as you can communicate with more people with.

[arnvald]

I'd be really surprised if Mandarin reached such status not only in 20 years, but in the next 100 years. While it certainly gets more popular due to China's growth as an economic power, its far behind English when it comes to number of non-native speakers.

On top of that, learning Mandarin is very difficult. It's a tonal language - as someone who has absolutely no ear for music, I find it challenging to understand the differences between different tones. The alphabet is another obstacle - even in China children at school learn words written in pinyin (system of writing Chinese characters in Latin alphabet) first. Even with China becoming an economic world leader, I don't see Mandarin becoming mainstream (having said that, I learn it and I enjoy it, although it takes me much, much longer than to learn any other European language)

[beojan]

> I believe that the only country in the EU who has English as an official language will be Ireland

And Malta. Though Malta is minuscule.

[ghaff]

Historically, French was the court language of Europe and therefore the the language of diplomacy. (US Passports include English, Spanish, and French; I think they used to only have English and French.) Of course, that's not going to happen even though Brussels is primarily Francophone.

[simias]

I didn't propose French because both France and Germany are often accused to have too much control and influence in the EU so I think there would be a significant push back if either of them tried to impose their language to the rest of the union.

Furthermore Spanish is probably easier than French for any kind of objective metric you could throw at them. In particular Castilian is easier to spell and has a simpler phonology. On top of that Spanish is one of the most widely spoken languages in the world. I think it would be a strong contender for "lingua franca", although that might be my romance language bias showing.

[shaki-dora]

Judging by the almost physical pain I experience when listening to non-native speakers trying to express themselves in my language, I think making English the lingua franca is a fitting revenge on all those imperialists.

They may have raped our natural resources and women, but they can’t protect their irregular verbs and diphthongs.

[enriquto]

> Judging by the almost physical pain I experience when listening to non-native speakers trying to express themselves in my language,

Just by curiosity, what is your mother tongue? In my case, hearing non-natives trying to speak my language fills me with a sudden outburst of joy! I just want to immediately become friends and help the person, and introduce them to my friends and family! (Maybe because it is quite rare to see foreigners learning catalan.)

[DoofusOfDeath]

> I’m German. We have a 70-years tradition, well deserved, of being embarrassed by our nationality and its outward signs.

I never understood the rationale of being proud, or embarrassed, about the actions of other persons. Guilt/pride by association just makes no sense to me; it seems like a complete non-sequitur.

Sure you're German, but neither you nor your contemporaries participated in the horrors before or during WW2.

[shaki-dora]

Nationalism is, for better or worse, part of human nature. It’d be mighty hypocritical for humanity at large if people could just pick and choose from their history.

For Germany specifically, denying responsibility for the holocaust just wouldn’t work if you also wanted to field a team at the soccer World Cup. Given that choice, even the right wing at least goes through the motions.

Two well-worn formula encapsulating the idea are “not guilt, but responsibility”, and “it happened once, therefore it can happen again”.

But the “dirty secret” of German identity is that we are living a rather good life within this cocoon of professed guilt. It’s not just about accepting history, but also (I hope) the work for peace and European integration that the country has done over the decades. But the result is that I very rarely actually experience negative consequences of my nationality. I’m far more liable to get encouraging feedback like yours. In a way, it’s the most successful humblebrag of history.

Politically, Germany had it far easier to escape the various calls to arms during the Cold War and beyond, or to keep its military smaller than official NATO agreements require. If you get really lucky, your country might even be forced to give up its fearsome currency, accidentally handing you the keys to a continent’s economy in the process.

Which is why I have no earthly idea why countries such as Turkey and Japan resist acceptance of their historical atrocities. Seriously: stop fighting it, and enjoy the adulation of a repentant sinner.

[dragonwriter]

> Nationalism is, for better or worse, part of human nature. It’d be mighty hypocritical for humanity at large if people could just pick and choose from their history.

It might be hypocritical, but nationalism not only regularly involves that, but goes beyond it to often involve picking and choosing from a combination of actual history and fictional history, and that seems to be at least as much part of human nature and nationalism itself.

[eeZah7Ux]

> Nationalism is, for better or worse, part of human nature.

Nonsense. Humans (and other mammals) are born with genetic programming to recognize faces, drink milk and cry when hungry. Nationalism is entirely a cultural artifact.

[nazgul17]

I disagree. Caring for "your" people is very much part of human nature. Where you draw the line can change (examples are blood, race, hometown, city, region, nation, continent, family etc), but "us vs them" it is an overwhelmingly common pattern.

[JoeDaDude]

I agree in principle as "nations" are a fairly recent development. Perhaps a better term would be "tribalism" as people like to belong and/or identify with a group - call it a tribe for lack of a better term.

Ideally, people would consider supra-national entities (such as the EU) as their tribe, but I wonder how far that will go. Even in a large country such as the USA, it is hard for everyone to identify as belonging to the same USA tribe, what with divisions of North-South, religion, race, etc.

[shaki-dora]

I’m German. We have a 70-years tradition, well deserved, of being embarrassed by our nationality and its outward signs.

Edit: I should add that, in my initial comment, the “raping” of women and natural resources was not meant to apply to Germany. It was more of a literary device playing on the sweeping accusation of imperialism.

[enriquto]

> I’m German. We have a 70-years tradition, well deserved, of being embarrassed by our nationality

But do you feel pain when non-natives try to speak german because they speak it incorrectly, or for some other reason?

I love german! I started learning it a few weeks ago, by reading the original Hilbert-Courant. I'll try not to slaughter your language by speaking it yet, though :)

[st1ck]

Sure, Spain has never did anything imperialistic!