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Saturday, August 07, 2004

The Economist: "After Babel, a new common tongue - It turns out to be English"

The Economist runs in its latest issue an

interesting article concerning the distribution of foreign language skills in Europe. They write:

"It turns out to be English

IN THE 17th century, educated people across central Europe could still communicate with each other in Latin. By the mid-19th century, the handiest language for a traveller through Mitteleuropa was the German spoken by the Habsburg monarchs who reigned over Hungarians, Czechs and many others. A little more than 100 years later, the dominant tongue was Russian.

Now the region's new language of choice for the 21st century is percolating upwards through the education system, and downwards from the business and political elite. It will be English, studied by three out of four secondary-school pupils from the Baltic to the Balkans. [...]"

This is good news. The EU policy should be adapted accordingly. Instead of further nurturing a gigantic translation apparatus for managing documents in a babylonic multitude of national languages, the reality should be faced. That means: English is and will be the 'lingua franca' throughout Europe for any forseeable future. And I hope that the next attempt to establish something like a EU Community Patent will take this fact into account: English should be the only Official language admissible for the proceedings before the competent patent office(s). In an earlier article, The Economist had

written in 2003:

"What do outsiders think of the Nordic people? The list of stereotypes ranges widely: they are good-looking, hard-drinking, heavily taxed and prone to suicide. They are also taciturn, but when they do open their mouths, they speak rather good English. These generalisations may or may not apply to any particular individual, but the point about proficiency in English seems to be true for the vast majority of the region's inhabitants. Most children now learn the language from the age of nine or ten, or even younger. English is quickly becoming the Nordic countries' lingua franca. [...]"

There is nothing to add.

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