Languages of the European Union

What should be the official language(s) of the European Union?

  • English

    Votes: 32 26.2%
  • English + French

    Votes: 3 2.5%
  • English + German

    Votes: 2 1.6%
  • German + French

    Votes: 1 0.8%
  • German + English + French

    Votes: 33 27.0%
  • Some other combination of major languages

    Votes: 6 4.9%
  • Latin

    Votes: 7 5.7%
  • Esperanto

    Votes: 4 3.3%
  • Modern Indo-European

    Votes: 2 1.6%
  • Other Auxlang

    Votes: 0 0.0%
  • Status Quo

    Votes: 11 9.0%
  • Status Quo + minority languages (eg. Catalan, Romani, Basque, Welsh, etc.)

    Votes: 8 6.6%
  • Some else entirely

    Votes: 5 4.1%
  • Godwynn is right: Deutsche Sprache #1

    Votes: 8 6.6%

  • Total voters
    122
Yes Portuguese and Spanish aren't the same, if you tell this word (embaraçado) to both, they will react differently.

Quick question, what does it mean in Portuguese (I know what it would mean in Castillian, assuming the cédille creates the same sound in Portuguese as it does in French.)

Being a lover of languages, I hate discussions on the creation of a universal language. I do love those minority languages (been an on again off again Welsh Learner for years :lol:)

However, from an administrative/financial aspect, as well as looking to the future if the EU some day wants to form some sort of a more cohesive nation state, an establishment of at least some sort of universal language would be most practical. I think I'd either go with the most prominently used languages (English, French, German, etc.), or, failing that, whichever languages would be considered "easiest to learn" I suppose (certainly not english haha). Although, how you would determine that, I have no clue.

The problem is that Europe has been so thoroughly divided for so long, creating such a diverse national/political/cultural spectrum that it is extremely difficult to do something on this scope without causing extreme outrage somewhere.
 
The idea of using Esperanto or Latin is ridiculous. Over half the EU has some knowledge of English. We don't need to waste resources teaching another language so that the French aren't offended. We already have a lingua franca!
Which is a very different thing from an official language.

It's like the old Swedish 17th c. Chancellor, and administrative genius, Axel Oxenstierna put it to his diplomats:
If your opposing number switches to his own language, no matter if you understand him or not, immediately switch to Swedish, and you keep it up as long as it takes, until he properly adresses you in Latin again.

English Lingua franca, as an accessory tool? All for it. As the official language for doing stuff within the EU? Nope.
 
Yes Portuguese and Spanish aren't the same, if you tell this word (embaraçado) to both, they will react differently.

I didn't say they are the same. They are different languages, no one would disagree.

You can not deny that one class (an hour a day 5 days a week for the school year) is enough to say that a Portuguese speaker will speak Spanish *well. And vis versa.

*Well enough to work in Spain or post in a Spanish forum for example.

Different they are of course. I can watch the news from Brazil and understand 100%. When I talk to people with thick accents I get totally lost sometimes and they have to repeat themselves 3 or 4 times.


Unlike Elta's hateful lies.


:lol:

I just calls em likes I sees em.


I wouldn't have any problem with even children of the Americas learning PIE. As long as everyone agrees to the rules of the language, then it is fine by me.

But to say that we can accurately resurrect a language that old when we can't even agree on whether or not base 8 or base 10 was used for counting is laughable.


And I agree on it being a better choice than Esperanto.
 
Which is a very different thing from an official language.

It's like the old Swedish 17th c. Chancellor, and administrative genius, Axel Oxenstierna put it to his diplomats:
If your opposing number switches to his own language, no matter if you understand him or not, immediately switch to Swedish, and you keep it up as long as it takes, until he properly adresses you in Latin again.

English Lingua franca, as an accessory tool? All for it. As the official language for doing stuff within the EU? Nope.

Well, a lot of stuff is done officially in the EU. And it ain't gonna be robots writing, but people, who'll need to know how to write. Appeasing nationalists is not a good enough reason to spend billions teaching a generation of crats how to write Esperanto or Latin, and getting another lot to "translate" for every place anywhere that needs to read them. In the 17th century "Europe" had a huge class of clerks knowledgeable in Latin. Today the same class knows English. This is the reality. ;)
 
Well, a lot of stuff is done officially in the EU. And it ain't gonna be robots writing, but people, who'll need to know how to write. Appeasing nationalists is not a good enough reason to spend billions teaching a generation of crats how to write Esperanto or Latin, and getting another lot to "translate" for every place anywhere that needs to read them. In the 17th century "Europe" had a huge class of clerks knowledgeable in Latin. Today the same class knows English. This is the reality. ;)
Yeah, we know English. The better we know it, the better we get at keeping it separate from our native tongues, and the less prone we get to switching to it. There's still a difference between a useful tool like a lingua franca and an official language.

But the artificiality of resurrecting Latin is in itself a good argument for sticking to the present language policy.
 
Lol. And you guys wonder why they didn't put you in Entropa.

Anyone who didn't know the Entropa is a sartircal piece of artwork celebrating the czech presidency. Its funneh!

* Austria, a known opponent of atomic energy, is a green field dominated by nuclear power plant cooling towers;[7] vapour comes out of them at intervals
* Belgium is presented as a half-full box of half-eaten Praline chocolates
* Bulgaria is depicted by a series of connected "Turkish" squat toilets;[8] neon-like lights connect and illuminate them (later hidden with fabric)[9]
* Cyprus is jigsawed (cut) in half
* The Czech Republic's own piece is an LED display, which flashes controversial quotations by Czech President Václav Klaus
* Denmark is built of Lego bricks, and some claim to see in the depiction a face reminiscent of the cartoon controversy,[10] though any resemblance has been denied by the artist[11]
* Estonia is presented with a hammer and sickle-styled power tools, the country has considered a ban on Communist symbols[12]
* Finland is depicted as a wooden floor and a male with a rifle lying down, imagining an elephant and a hippo.[13]
* France is draped in a "GRÈVE!" ("STRIKE!") banner[8]
* Germany is a series of interlocking autobahns, described as "somewhat resembling a swastika",[8][14][15] though that is not universally accepted;[16] some Czech military historians also suggest that the autobahns resemble the number "18", which some Neonazi groups use as code for A.H. initials.[17] Cars move along the roads.
* Greece is depicted as a forest that is entirely burned, possibly representing the 2007 Greek forest fires and the 2008 civil unrest in Greece.[18]
* Hungary features an Atomium made of its common agricultural products watermelons and Hungarian sausages, based on a floor of peppers
* Ireland is depicted as a brown bog with bagpipes protruding from Northern Ireland; the bagpipes play music every five minutes[citation needed]
* Italy is depicted as a football pitch[8] with several players who appear to be masturbating[15] with the footballs they each hold.
* Latvia is shown as covered with mountains, in contrast to its actual flat landscape
* Lithuania a series of dressed Manneken Pis-style figures urinating; the streams of urine are presented by a yellow lighting glass fibers
* Luxembourg is displayed as a gold nugget with "For Sale" tag[8]
* Malta is a tiny island with its prehistoric dwarf elephant as its only decoration; there's a magnifying glass in front of the elephant
* The Netherlands has disappeared under the sea with only several minarets still visible;[8] the piece is supposed to emit the singing of muezzins
* Poland has a piece with priests erecting the rainbow flag of the Gay rights movement, in the style of the U.S. Marines raising the Stars and Stripes at Iwo Jima.[19]
* Portugal is shown as a wooden cutting board with three pieces of meat in the shape of its former colonies of Brazil, Angola, and Mozambique
* Romania is a Dracula-style theme park,[8] which is set up to blink and emit ghostly sounds at intervals.
* Slovakia is depicted as a Hungarian sausage (or a human body wrapped in Hungarian tricolor)
* Slovenia is shown as a rock engraved with the words first tourists came here 1213
* Spain is covered entirely in concrete,[20] with a concrete mixer situated in the northeast
* Sweden does not have an outline, but is represented as a large Ikea-style self-assembly furniture box, containing Gripen fighter planes[21] (as supplied to the Czech Air Force)
* The United Kingdom, known for its Euroscepticism and relative isolation from the Continent, is "included" as a missing piece (an empty space) at the top-left of the work[8]
 
Esparanto sucks for a number of reasons.

If you want to use an Auxlang that is much more naturalistric, and hell simply more fitting as a European language than a language whose phonology was based on the speaker's polish dialect, use Modern Indo-European! Based on the ancestor of all european languages (except the finns, estonians, hungarians, and basques, but who really cares about them?) it's extremely adaptable in its vocabulary (unlike Elta's hateful lies)

You can download the grammar here.

No complaining about linguistic complexity, by the way - no (natural non-pidgin) language's grammar is no more complex than another. English's lack of a complex verbal conjugation and nominal declension is matched by its complex periphrastic constructions and rigid word order. (There's the matter of spelling too but that's not language!)

Fair enough. I've always liked parts of Esperanto, but have always thought that it could have been done better. I did not actually vote in the poll, I just like rooting for the little guy. :)
 
Any language spoken by at least 20% of the population, so
English (51%), German (32%) and French (26%).

Italian is 16%, Spanish 15% and Polish 10%. They can joing the club when they manage to have their language taught more in other EU countries.
 
I like 1/3 more. It's a rational little island in a sea of irrationality.
 
Any language spoken by at least 20% of the population, so
English (51%), German (32%) and French (26%).

Italian is 16%, Spanish 15% and Polish 10%. They can joing the club when they manage to have their language taught more in other EU countries.

I say 10%. So En, De, Fr, Il, Es, and Po.
 
It should be the languages that are official in more than one country (not including regional languages). That would mean Dutch, English, French, German, Greek and Swedish.
 
I like 1/3 more. It's a rational little island in a sea of irrationality.
1/3 would mean only English, it doesn't represent the diversity of Europe well. 1/4 is much better.
 
It should be the languages that are official in more than one country (not including regional languages). That would mean Dutch, English, French, German, Greek and Swedish.
And Irish?
 
Back
Top Bottom