Douwe Osinga's Blog: A Pan European Language

Friday, July 4, 2003

The issue which language(s) to use in the European Union has taken up a lot of time already and will probably do so more in the future. This, of course, is silly. Europe already has a language that everybody speaks. Everybody except the British, but they haven't joined the Euro and they still might. These things take longer with the British, so they might learn to speak Euro-English yet.


Put a Frenchman and a Czech in a room and they will have no trouble at all understanding each other. Add somebody from Liverpool and they won't understand a word of the new guy. The accent is wrong, the words are akward, people from Great Brittian have great difficulty making themselves understood in Europe.


It sounds over the top, but it is true. And the EU should draw its conclusions. Euro English should be the European language, and should be taught in school instead of the strange mishmash of American and British we have now. Some money should be spend on research into this new language and more importantly, we should come up with European way of spelling the language. Euro English may be derived from British, there is really now reason to take the spelling, which is as arcane as the pound and mile.

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