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231 points rntn | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0s | source
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cm2187 ◴[] 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 ◴[] 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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tluyben2 ◴[] No.35413518[source]
I don’t care which language it is, but pick one as the official one. English makes sense economically. German cannot happen because the past. Spanish or German or French are all fine, but of course it cannot be agreed on. So English makes it easier as well for that reasons maybe.
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noncoml ◴[] No.35414017[source]
Pick Italian. Beautiful language, lots of common words with most languages and I don’t think any non-EU countries use it. And if everything else fails, you start using your hands to communicate.

Mid 40s here and wouldn’t mind at all to start learning Italian if it was the common language of EU.

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pb7 ◴[] No.35414873[source]
Why pick the language of one of the weakest EU members?
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tmtvl ◴[] No.35415519{3}[source]
It has the best operas.
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1. pb7 ◴[] No.35415652{4}[source]
And Poland has the best pierogis and I like pierogis more than operas. ;-)