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?
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.
