When my daughter was in Germany she got to go to some meetings of high school teachers (and some students) from five different countries, none English-speaking. All the meetings and reports were in English as the only common language. Not an official EU activity, of course. Her Masters program in international business, at a German university, was in English. She had to pass a test proving her proficiency.
OK, I looked it up. There is only one member for each EU state in the commission. I thought it would be proportional to the EU population at large (but didn’t you say that as well in your last post?). In any case, it looks like Juncker was grandstanding or joking when he said that.
Since when has the stupidity of an idea been an impediment in the mind of any bureaucrat?
The European Commission, The executive branch of the EU, has one commissioner from each member state appointed by the European Council.
The European Council is made up of the elected heads of government of each member state.
The European Parliament has differing numbers of MEPs based on each member state’s population, popularlyelected by each member state.
The Council of the European Union is a body with a membership of one representative from each member state’s government, but the specific representative depends upon the topic on the table.
Yes; our instructor in one computer science course was from Norway, and mentioned that by 3rd year university in Norway, most classes were in English. (One class the instructor had asked who wanted English vs. Norwegian, and English won overwhelmingly) All the textbooks and technical materials would be English; very few Norwegian materials at that level, especially in the 1970’s and 80’s. maybe Swedish Medieval literature or French Social Studies don’t need English, but for most advanced technical/scientific studies I’m sure the overwhelming amount of reference material is either in English or easily available translated to that from a different foreign language.
English is emerging, at least temporarily, as the new Latin for scientific literature (though I would not expect its use in random university lectures, except at an international university), but it would be interesting to hear more facts on how politicians and diplomats pick working languages, even to chat with each other at parties. I assume these people are all fluent in French and German as well as English.
“Is emerging”, no, has been for a while. When I was in college we had to learn English and either French or German because there were important sources in both French and German; several of those non-English journals had English editions but later than the originals; several have disappeared.
And the notion that politicians and diplomats will always know that specific triad doesn’t make much sense, specially once you stop thinking that all diplomats are from a majority-white country. German is a relatively minoritary language: it’s important in specific industries for cultural reasons but not particularly in terms of being able to negotiate with as many people as possible (gaming for example: Hispanics are happy to play in a foreign language; Germanics refuse to unless they think they understand it perfectly).
Plus there’s a geographical factor; German functions as a lingua franca in Central Europe; Russian in Central Asia; but neither would be much use in ;arge parts of Africa, say. Diplomats picking an informal working language (to use at a party, say) will tend to pick one that is a lingua franca for the place where the party is held, even if the diplomats themselves are from elsewhere. But of course this must also depend on the diplomats concerned, and the languages they have at their disposal.
The problem is more obvious with more minor (less widely spoken) languages, and not just European ones. I would have expected that Spanish at least, being the primary language also of most of a continent, would be a bit more insulated from this - but then, for technical materials, the areas more active tend to dominate.
There’s a throw-away bit in Neal Stephenson’s “Reamde” where a Hungarian character is perusing the newsstand and muses when seeing an English magazine on Model Railroading how it’s amazing to a Hungarian-speaker that there are languages where there are enough interested people it is cost-effective to put together and print glossy magazines devoted to an obscure topic - something you don’t think about if your first language is English.
EU civil servant here. There are two different aspects of that to distinguish.
One is whether English will remain an official language of the Union. The answer to that is definitely yes; as has been noted above, it remains the official language of two remaining Member States, Ireland and Malta. That alone is, admittedly, not sufficient to make it an official language; the legal rule is not that any official language of any Member State is automatically an official language of the Union (if that were the case, Luxembourgish would also be an official language, but it is not). Instead, the official languages are listed explicitly in the Treaties (Article 55 TEU). The Treaties will be amended to give effect to Brexit, so legally it would be possible to delete English from that list, but it’s not expected that this will be done. The number of speakers post-Brexit will not be decisive; languages with very low numbers of speakers have also attained official language status, such as Maltese, which even in terms of native speakers will rank below English post-Brexit (in terms of second language speakers, of course, it’s separated from English by many orders of magnitude).
Another question is whether it will retain its status as a working language of the EU institutions. Officially, there are three “procedural languages” (English, French, German) for working use, but that rule doesn’t mean much in practice (as exemplified by the insignificant actual use of German). As a matter of fact, different EU institutions have differentestablished practices for how work is done internally. The Court of Justice works almost exclusively in French; the ECB, where I work, works almost exclusievly in English; and at the Commission, to my knowledge, the situation is about evenly divided between English and French. My guess it that in the short to medium term, nothing will change in this regard, simply because those employees who are more confident in English than in French will stay. In the longer run, it’s possible that there could be a shift towards French, but a complete abandonment of English will certainly not happen in the foreseeable future; its global status is too entrenched for that.
I, personally, would much prefer the EU institutions to ditch the working language use of French entirely and switch completely to English, but it ain’t gonna happen…
Would you please elaborate? Is it simply a matter of picking one working language instead of having several, and in that case it may as well be English? (But in that case it may equally as well be French…)
It might even be to the Union’s benefit to use a working language which isn’t the first language of a significant nation in the Union: That avoids any issues of partisanship or favoritism in which language to choose.
The status quo is that each EU institution or agency* sets its working language arrangement independently. The background is that - in spite of the popular perception of Brussels as the seat of the EU - there is no true “capital” of the EU; the institutions or agencies are spread all over the continent, and even though there are some concentrations in cities such as Brussels or Luxembourg, many agencies are the only EU bodies in the city or even country in which they are located. Each of these institutions and agencies runs itself, and adopts its own internal procedures and staff rules governing how work is done. Sometimes, these arrangements are the result of actual practice rather than formal rule-setting, but in such cases the arrangements can nonetheless be very entrenched.
Those institutions which are located in francophone countries, or were deliberately built on the model of the French civil service, have a stronger tendency to use French. An example is the Court of Justice. It ois located in francophone Luxembourg, applies a law which is, procedurally, deliberately modelled on French administrative law, and which established its practices very early in the EU’s history, long before the UK joined. All these factors explain the dominance of French in the workings of the Court. As a consequence, the inner procedures of the Court are all in French. French is the language which the judges and their clerks use in their deliberations; it is the language into which briefs submitted by parties are translated, with the judges reading them in the French translation rather than the original; and French is the language in which internal meetings of Court personnel are held. The ECB, on the other hand, was established much later, is active in an area (financial markets) which is globally dominated by English, and is located in Germany, where people are more likely to speak English. As a consequence, the ECB has regulated internally that English is its working language, and that is the language in which meetings are held and internal documents or messages drafted. It is, of course, perfectly possible that several staff members who happen to share another common language sit together and chat in that language; imagine, for instance, two Italians discussing a work-related matter among the two of them, which may well be in Italian. As soon as it’s a more official meeting involving a wider range of people, however, it would be in English. Yet other institutions, and I understand that the Commission is among them, have developed a bilingual culture where meetings are about equally likely to be in English or in French.
These things all concern the internal workings of the authorities involved. As far as relations with outsiders are concerned, it is clear in EU law that you can write to any EU authority in any of the 24 official languages and expect to receive a reply in the same language. But that doesn’t mean the issue will be processed in that language. If you write to an EU authority in, say, Czech, the submission will be translated into the working language of the authority, processed in that language, and subsequently the reply will be re-translated into Czech before it is sent out. Same for litigation, where the applicant in a case chooses the language of the proceedings and is entitled to make submissions in that language; but, as mentioned above, the judges will receive French translations of these submissions and work predominantly on the basis of that.
*): That terminology is EU speak. In that parlance, an “institution” is one of those bodies defined in the Treaties themselves, such as the Parliament, the Council, the Commission etc. They are, in a way, the supreme constitutional entities of the Union. In addition, there are also “agencies” - authorities defined by secondary legislation with jursidiction over a given subject matter.
The Esperanto movement is putting a lot of hope into such arguments, but to little success so far.
Interestingly, the use of English in EU institutions has given rise to a research subject in linguistics, “EU English”. The idea is that the large number of EU civil servants who speak and write English on a daily basis amongst each other but not as a native language has led to the development of a distinct variety of English spoken within the EU administration, with noticeable differences compared to actual anglophone countries. There is some truth to it; there are many instances of words or grammatical constructions which are used all the time in EU institutions even though they would be considered wrong under the normal rules of English. It all starts with a false friend from another language which then perpetuates itself in practical use.