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"One European Language?"

I'm having to do a report and language and translation within the EU. One of the ways of solving the problem of having to translate technical documents would be for eveyone to speak the same language.

What do you think of that? Would you be happy to abandon English and learn a new Euro-Language?

Or would you prefer to make everyone else speak English, as they all learn it as a second language anyway?

Failing that, do you think that all countries should keep their respective tongues and we carry on as we are at the moment?

English is the dominant language around the world, and is only accelerating in its penetration of other cultures. Even the Spanish are paying us to go over there and teach them English. In other countries, say France, for instance, you have a fair amount of written/aural media in English only, such as English/American films and music. You don't get any French/Japanese films in England, and those that do get here are dubbed.

tso, I speak Russian and German.

Everyone else in Europe speaks English already. It's only us Brits with our backward educational system who can't speak any other languages. In fact we almost pride ourselves for not being able to, "hur hur hur oi garcon duex bier er danka?"

So instead of learning languages we did RE (interesting to learn about other cultures but surely if we could learn their languages, we could find out this "made up stuff" ourselves and perhaps racial/religious bigotory would be less frequent if we all understood each other), Home economics (making crap cakes for 45 weeks of the year), Rural studies (the f**kers made me, I had to stay behind at lunchtime for digging in some t***'s potato patch too-never forgiven him) blah blah blah.

In a stinking mood generally to be honest....

The way i see it is this.

We speak English
America speaks english
We should all speak English.

Dont bother calling me ignorant, im kidding.

Yes, I would be annoyed.

As would almost everyone. It's too late to implement a universal language, which would invariably be English as it's the most widely spoken one.

Although if we all sounded the same singing and talking with accents would lose their effect.

Make them all speak English.

But I know they would be asking the same thing and then they would be saying

"Argh, maken themenen speake Allemagne!"

"Ah, oui oui, mon froggy est still alivé! They moost parle en Francais!"

"Jurgen splurgen flargen speaken en Sveeeden"

"vbjkb hijnb fb eihe fnarrr"

"They must-a speaky like-a its-a meeee, Italiano"

Bah

We should just stay as we are I guess but put more emphasis on educated different languages to kids

Can't see any other way unless a super Star Trek thing

Ah, but we're not looking at it in terms of basics. I have to look at it in the context of technical documentation which has a lot of jargon included in it.

For that kind of thing, automated translators are a bit poo, and it's easy to misinterpret it when it's translated straight from, say, English in to French.

A more fair and efficient way is for each country to learn the basics in popular languages:

English
French
Spanish
German

And you need to start them young when you are just learning English... that's what they do in other countries... not start when you're 12 and struggle.

It would never work... very few people could just learn a language like that.

L337ist wrote:
> A mass marketed Babel fish would be far easier on everybody.

Yup, but they are rubbish.

What I was trying to get at with the question was whether you'd be annoyed if someone said "Right, you have to learn a new language now. Everyone in the EU will now sound the same."

Or whether your accent/language meant something to you and you wanted to keep it?