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?
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.
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.
Good point, but I am not so sure the UK (or even England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland separately at some point) won’t rejoin in the future.
Yes, that is definitely a danger, but of course - the easier it is to learn, the more likely anyone could pick it up. However, I do think it would have to be learned in schools across the entire Union for it to work. Learning Esperanto first allegedly increases a student’s ability to learn other foreign languages, so it would not necessarily come at the expense of other foreign languages. I suspect that has to do with getting used to learning a language, and if that is true, than any sufficiently easy language could serve the same purpose. And something that could strengthen multilingualism in Europe in general (more language-savvy people = more people picking up additional European languages and to a higher proficiency).
I personally think it is more worthwhile to spend learning another EU language. The general benefit of better understanding how languages work will be the same, but you end up with a practical language skill. I am a bit tired of the argument anyways, having had to learn Latin with the exact same argument and it was a complete waste of time.
Hehe, I get that. However, if adopted properly, it would be a practical language skill, as it would be a language officially in use. Besides, if those studies described above are to be trusted (not sure if they are), it would facilitate additional language learning. But that argument is what you are getting at with your comment on Latin?
There are generalized benefits from learning a language that will make it easier to learn other languages. But which language doesn’t really matter, and learning a dead or artificial language might have some theoretical benefits in that regard, but in practical terms you will learn less of it as there is less material to practice on and in general the motivation to learn a language you can barely use will be low for most people.
It should be noted that being multilingual at all improves the ability to acquire new unfamiliar words, this isn’t something unique to Esperanto (or at least, that project does not show that Esperanto is uniquely good for this purpose)
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.
A language with no grammatical irregularities for starters. And one where the phonetics are consistent. Constructed languages can offer this. Whether any existing ones are sufficiently easy, I’m not sure.
And then some mechanisms that facilitates vocabulary building. For instance, I like the affixes in Esperanto, as understanding the root word and then the affixes allows you to pick up all kinds of words you never explicitly learned. And example is -ejo, which indicates a place, could be combined with a root word such as the verb forĝas (to forge, root: forĝ-), yielding forĝejo = place where one forges. Or monero (money, root: moner-) + -ejo yields monerejo = place where one stores money (= monero).
I’m sure with modern linguistic knowledge a much easier language than Esperanto could be constructed.
The question was whether an auxillary language would be a good idea. It would necessarily be dictated. Every citizen would learn it in school. The proposed benefit having a a common language easily learned and spoken equally well by all member state citizens, that could be used to cross language barriers (like English is today), and that could be used within EU (i.e. all institutions) as an official language.
For the record, I am intrigued by the idea, but I am very open to this being a bad idea, which is why I made the thread to hear people’s opinions.