Brexit and the English Language in the EU!

The United Kingdom finally left the European Union on January 31^st, 2020. The political debate surrounding this event is still ongoing. But for the purposes of this blog, my interest is focused on the future of the English language in a European Union without Britain. I already wrote an article in 2016 and you can find it here. My article highlighted the reasons why English might remain as an official language in the EU.

There were points of view against this possibility as well. One of the main points against the use of English in the EU as an official language after Brexit is that every country that is a member can only register one language as official (this to the effects of making it official in the EU). Although there were 3 countries who listed  English as their language, the UK was the only one who notified it as official (The other 2 are Ireland and Malta, who registered Gaelic and Maltese respectively). In 2016, Danuta Hübner, head of the European Parliament’s Constitutional Affairs Committee (AFCO) and a senior MP of the European Parliament, suggested that with the Brexit, English will no longer be an official language in the EU. 

  

Today, after the departure of the UK, everything points out that although the country has left, its main language will still be used as an official and working language.

Some of the reasons I listed in my article are still valid. If we talk about the top trading partners of the EU, data from 2018, the 2 most important are the USA and China. English is the main language of communication with them. If we extend our list to the top 10, only 2 of them, Switzerland and Canada, have alternative common languages (French in both cases, German and Italian with Switzerland). Among the other countries, we have Turkey, Norway, Japan, India, and South Korea, countries that very often prefer to use English for International trading. On the other hand, English is by far the most common language used as a second language. According to Eurostat, 95% of students in the upper secondary in the EU was learning English.

Today, according to the European Commission, 81% of the documents to be translated are originally written in English and this includes drafted documents and communications from international organizations outside the EU. It seems that translators and interpreters who work with English will not lose their jobs.

When the EU was created, French was the main language in use. English was registered as an official language when the UK joined the EU in 1973. When countries such as Sweden, Finland, Malta, Cyprus, and other Eastern European countries joined the EU, countries where English was widely used or learned as a second language, English became the most common language in use. Then, this language became the most used in internal debates.

But recently, a new point in favor of English as official language came: As you can read in an article in Our Time, English is now much closer to becoming a neutral language in the EU, where most people use it as a second language and no one owns it. 

In my opinion, it does not matter whether English will be or not an official language in the EU. In the end, they need it. The fact that this is the main language they use for trade, inside and outside the block, and is the main foreign language learned by the citizens of the member states in the school makes unthinkable to have a multilingual EU without the English language.

Languages are spoken by people and are they who make the changes. If people feel comfortable speaking in a language, then this will be the language in use. Today, English is used when people who speak different languages want to communicate. Tomorrow we could have a different panorama.  

I was reading that when different colonies of the British Empire became independent, many of them decided to keep the English language official because it was regarded as a neutral language. They used the example of India. 

After using the language for a while, they developed their own vocabulary and grammar. The separation between the EU and Britain can paradoxically lead to a similar situation: English is used as a neutral language, and we might see soon the development of a Euro-English. English no longer belongs to a specific country… It belongs to its speakers.