I know this is a question that is discussed all the time but I would like to see this community going so I will try to create a discussion here.
So what I mean is not only about language used at level of European institutions, but more about setting a standard for European citizens. While English is closest to the standard “European” language nowadays, as far as I know there is a huge difference between the amount of English speakers in different European countries, not to even mention the level of fluency of those who can speak English. How do you think this problem will/should be solved? Further emphasis on teaching/learning English? Eventually, do you think finding different “lingua franca” for European Union is possible? Also, what do you think the attitude of member states will be to potentially going “bilingual” in the future?
I’m a fan of multilingualism and think it should be defended at every level of government! The current 24 official languages of the EU should be closer to 50.
Mutual intelligibility already go a long way and it wouldn’t be any different. Czech and Slovak people can work and study in each other’s countries without ever passing any kind of language test. People in Scandinavia can choose to do university exams in their own language! Probably the same would happen with Catalan and Occitan, or Sardinian and Corsican, were they not neglected!
There’s also translation and interpretation. We have the means and the money to have a completely functioning multilingual apparatus.
Multilingualism is good for society, cognition and culture
In cases where we need one language I think we could take a page out of Switzerland’s book, where they use Latin for those cases (coins, namely). The EU already does with their website. I think another cool option could be Modern Indo-European, Lidepla or maybe using Interlingua, Interslavic and creating some sort of Intergermanic?
The problem with using one of those is you always leave someone out: everyone non-Romance with Latin, everyone non-IE with Modern Indo-European. Even with the last option you’d leave Uralic, Basque and Maltese out. Maybe the EU could fund a conlanging project to design a Intereuropean language for use in logos and names of institutions only? Because in general communication, as I already said, everyone should speak their own lamguage
I personally think this is an issue that will become less important in the future: we already have gone super far compared with 20 years ago when it comes to automated translations, and it’s still getting better, so I don’t think it will be necessary to have a “standard European language”. Of course, for legal documents there must be a standard, but most people won’t have to interact directly with those documents so it doesn’t require that language to be well known to all
Esperanto! I know its not practical, but it was invented for this purpose.