5mo ago

Should the EU adopt an official, simplified auxillary language?

While English is still the de facto lingua franca, with the US burning bridges to Europe like there's no tomorrow, and the UK having left the EU, should they adopt an easy-to-learn auxillary language?

I'm thinking of an language like Esperanto, but not necessarily that. I was intrigued by Esperanto and went through the course on lernu.net and found it easy to pick up (though I am by no means fluent yet). While it is constructed, it was developed without any modern linguistic knowledge, so another option could be to construct a new language for this purpose, or adopt another already developed language that would serve the purpose better (I don't have an overview of what is out there).

I know there are several official languages already, but I imagine that leads to a lot of overhead. An auxillary language could make communication easier, and make it easier for citizens of any member state to participate in the Union, and would to some extent remove any power asymmetry resulting from native mastery of a language.

Good idea? Poor idea? Why? Why not?

37 comments

https://xkcd.com/927/ Just replace "Standards" with "Languages"
English is a piss simple language to learn that the vast majority is already speaking. No need to overthink here. Also if you look at the regulatory side: Eu Government Documents are already always available in all languages spoken in the EU. So any legal barrier is non existent
- Hehe, that one is often suitable, and I think it fits nicely here.
  I don't count English as a particularly easy language to master. Do you not think there are some problems that arise from assymetry in ability to learn English? Not just thinking about legal documents, but debates, discussions, negotiations etc.
  And is this massive amount of translation not just very inefficient? Although I suspect at best a new language would come in addition, so we're back to the xkcd-strip and nothing was solved there.
  
  Do you not think there are some problems that arise from assymetry in ability to learn English?
  Since the UK left (and Ireland and Malta being the only ones left speaking English natively I think) this problem got less problematic. If it is a foreign language almost for all, the differences are not that big.
  Artificial languages have the problem that they will end up being spoken only by an elite, which would be highly problematic for the EU, which is already seen as an elite project by all too many people in the EU.
  
  I'm curious, what language would you consider being easy to learn?
  English has roots in celtic, germanic and romanic languages and thereby offers some familiarities to basically every western european language.
  I can see that for native speakers of a slavic or finno-ugric language other languages of their families might be easier to learn though.
  However, it's not that you can dictate a language. Switching takes time. So maybe it would be smarter to pick a widespread slavic language and teach it alongside English from early on in schools. Takes as long as spreading a constructed language but doesn't neee the additional effort of, you know, construction a language for 27+ countries and retains diversity and inclusion.
- English is a bad option for an IAL imo, and I dislike how it has become so dominant in this aspect, Esperanto has its own flaws however, if the EU were to adopt an IAL there would have to be a lot of considering
No, I can't see a single good reason to do that.
No, respecting diversity is one of main EU values, this could only lead to discrimination.
- Interesting point that I did not consider, and not sure I fully understand. How would it lead to discrimination do you think?
  
  To make it easy, the new language would probably be based on a language with most speakers, be it native or learned, and it would further push smaller languages aside. Say, it's based off a germanic language. Germans or Dutch would learn it in a bit, but Slavic people might struggle.
  Languages are tied to people and is a very important part of culture which is why fabricated languages would never even make it, but even if one made it, someone would have advantage in learning it and it's a powerful tool.
But we already have translators for this, so why add a 25th offical language?
- Does translators not just lead to inefficient communication?
  
  Only if they are bad translators.
Absolutely not
- What is the main reason this is a poor idea to you?
  
  It's too difficult to implement.
  Don't fix it if it's not broken.
  We're literally speaking English right now.
Let's just go with plain english.
Apparently Esperanto was considered at one point by the League of Nations, I wonder how popular it would be now if it was adopted
Everyone speaks English all around the world. I’m cool with that, would rather our kids learning it from kindergarten on than learning some random new language that’d be useless anywhere else. People can still keep their native tongue & stuff, idc, just make the whole EU English speaking
I fully support returning to Latin. Dulce est desipere in loco!
Because creating a new language, "European", is going to be perceived as an attack on their identity by a lot of people. It fundamentally changes what "European" means.
Using English or French can be tolerated as a practicality that predates the EU.
Nah - let's just use English and distort it to annoy UKers and USers(*) instead! :)
(*) those who notice
- So make it german? Yeah i agree

37 comments