We already have a common language that's widely known across Europe (English), it just doesn't have the reach that the native language does.
Some countries are also really self centered in terms of news, etc. Here in Spain, for example, most national news deal mostly with corruption scandals, political issues in Catalonia, sports, and little else. Geopolitical and/or European issues are given surprisingly little time considering we're the fifth largest economy in the union (about to be the fourth after/if the UK leaves).
It's quite different. The UK hasn't sent police to stop the Scottish referendum and beat up voters and the EU has not sought the extradition of Nigel Farage.
I believe the poster was meaning that the UK press is insular and doesn't report on wider European issues like the Spanish press and not commenting on Catalonia or making a comparison with Scotland.
Now if Britain is leaving, English could be considered as a neutral language so no country has an advantage.
It is also still the only language that is taught as a foreign language in close to all primary and secondary schools in the Union. It's the most spoken language in the Union. It's relatively easy to learn as a foreign language. It's also the de facto language of international trade, of science, of culture and of international diplomacy (sorry France).
True, but Ireland is less than 5M, 13 seats in the EU parliament. They are not seen as a competition to anyone. The UK is 66M with 73 seats in the parliament, member of G7 and one of the most important economies in the EU.
Surely the case for English as a working language is now stronger. Previously it could have been seen as unfair to use one member state's language over another...
However I'm just looking at my kids that are tri-lingual at the moment with fourth in the works and they prefer to use English even though we actively force them to speak my wife's and my native languages at home... which are of European group too, so not even close in complexity to Chinese or Arabic. English has less exceptions, there is no conjugation, no gender-specific adjective forms, not that many verb tenses, etc. It's just that - it's an uncomplicated language.
> It's just that - it's an uncomplicated language.
I disagree. It might not have conjugation, genders, etc, but it managed to more than make up for the lack of complexity with superb amounts of complexity in spelling, phrasal verbs, irregular verbs, etc.
English is a second language for me and compared to many other languages it's comparatively very simple, or at least you can start to understand and speak it at very basic level incredibly quickly. The biggest issue with English is completely inconsistent and illogical pronunciation, you can have two words that have the same spelling but different meaning depending on how they are pronounced - read and read for example. But the grammar is almost laughably simple and the lack of any sort of variation when it comes to gendered adjectives and verbs puts it firmly in the category of easy languages to learn.
> But the grammar is almost laughably simple and the lack of any sort of variation when it comes to gendered adjectives and verbs puts it firmly in the category of easy languages to learn.
This just sounds like cherry-picking. You're completely glossing over the issue of spelling being insane and concluding that the language is easy because there are no gendered adjectives and many tenses, even though the existing tenses are largely completely irregular.
Yet it's the language with
- the most available teaching services
- the most available free teaching resources
- highest percent of use-cases in the world
- easiest methods of finding a training companion anywhere in the world
It's just so far ahead in these structural things that supporting any other language does not seem to make any sense anymore at this point.
English is pretty easy due to the insane amounts of English media we consume.
I could speak and understand decent English when I was less than 10 or so due to watching so many subtitled shows and playing video games.
My native language is Finnish. Which is farther from English than Hindi (Which is in indo-european language tree unlike Finnish).
The biggest obstacle to using something like Mandarin is the writing system. Hieroglyphs are imho just fundamentally inferior to systems using alphabets.
>English is pretty easy due to the insane amounts of English media we consume.
As an American, I've been studying German for about 15 years, but although I've never officially studied Spanish, I speak and understand casual Spanish better then I do German. I wouldn't be able to read a Spanish novel like I can in German, but I can understand Spanish speakers and text message Spanish speakers far better than I can in German. All of this is from picking up the language through media, listening to Spanish speakers in my town, and hearing some of my wife's family speaking Spanish to each other.
German, on the other hand, is very difficult for me to encounter on the street and nearly as difficult to find cultural material to consume (Amazon carries German-language Harry Potter, 50 Shades of Grey, and that's about it).
There is a lot to be said about passively learning a language just from hearing it constantly.
I spoke German and Italian before learning English, and English didn't seem that terribly hard. Most words have the same stem as latin or germanic languages so it's easy to remember the vocabulary. The grammar isn't very complex. And there aren't special letters in the alphabet.
Only the pronounciation is complex, because things are often spoken differently than how they are written.
You basically spoke the two languages English is made of, so naturally it was easy to remember the vocabulary for you. Special letters in the alphabet is only hard when you're trying to write the words, but English spelling being mostly unrelated to pronunciation is a major source of pain for learners. Tenses are formed irregularly, much of the language is phrasal verbs which there's no way around learning, and since English is basically two languages you have double the difficulty because words only relate to their half.
On the other hand you don't need to worry about cases, gender etc with English, as it jettisoned those features. No need to memorise what gender a table is, or wondering which one of 14 cases to use.
Every language is irregular because humans are irregular, but I don't think it is justified to paint English as somehow more difficult than other languages. The difficulty of a language just depends on the languages you already know, prior exposure, available resources to learn it etc - and the last two of these are typically much better for English than most other languages.
English is indeed one of the simplest languages to learn, as is Mandarin. English, Mandarin, and Latin are the standard examples for the theory in linguistics that simplicity in a language is caused by absorbing a large number of speakers who had to learn as adults.
I wouldn't underestimate the difficulty of picking up a highly tonal language like Mandarin, if only exposed to the 44 phonemes of English well into adulthood...
