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Italian government seeks to penalize the use of English words

(www.cnn.com)
231 points rntn | 6 comments | 02 Apr 23 17:19 UTC | HN request time: 1.306s | source | bottom
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cm2187 ◴[02 Apr 23 18:02 UTC] No.35413324[source]▶
Whether the UK is part of the EU or not is irrelevant to using english as a mean of communication between europeans. I remember a study from the French ministry of education which estimated for each language, what was the percentage of the EU population, to which it is not a native language, that studied it as a foreign language either in high school or university.

German and italian are in the 15-20% range, french and spanish in the 30% area, english north of 90%.

When you have 27 different EU nationals in a room, there is just one language they can practically speak among themselves. The EU will not go anywhere if its countries resist adopting english.

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kuboble ◴[02 Apr 23 18:06 UTC] No.35413357[source]▶
My personal hope is that the EU would make a plan to adopt English as the only official language.

Now that UK is gone it can't be seen as unfairly promoting one country.

I think the example of Switzerland shows that there is no problem if spoken language is different from official language.

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1. jsnell ◴[02 Apr 23 18:18 UTC] No.35413495[source]▶
How does Switzerland demonstrate that?
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2. kuboble ◴[02 Apr 23 18:31 UTC] No.35413641[source]▶
In German speaking parts of Switzerland people speak Swiss German. The official and written language is high German.

Although loosely related, they are two different languages.

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3. leonhard ◴[02 Apr 23 20:02 UTC] No.35414541[source]▶
Hm I’m not sure this is a good example, it’s really just a dialect. Any German speaker can usually understand most of it when concentrating a bit. And Wikipedia seems to agree. [1]

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_German

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4. samus ◴[02 Apr 23 21:44 UTC] No.35415575{3}[source]▶
The official written language is German, albeit a different standard than non-Swiss German. The difference is not that big, it's like between written American and British English. But I can assure you that most non-Swiss German speakers can't casually understand Swiss German dialects.

Edit: these dialect are commonly used in court, public offices, and often on TV. They have a vastly stronger role in public life than in other German-speaking countries.

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5. angrais ◴[02 Apr 23 22:35 UTC] No.35415993{4}[source]▶
That's dialects though. The same could be said for most regions in the UK from people living in the UK or abroad, e.g., a Scouse understanding a Glaswegian. This is similar in Italia across regions.
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6. kuboble ◴[03 Apr 23 08:01 UTC] No.35420074{5}[source]▶
They are dialects. Swiss German isn't a language but a group of dialects, but they aren't closer to high German than Czech is to Polish.

I think my point stands that it's a distinct language from the official one. It definitely feels like that in practice where a lot swiss people feel like they have to wear their official hat when speaking regular German and they prefer to have casual beer conversation in English rather than high German.