Jay Doubleyou: "this is me totally sausage" - or, the difficulties of english as a lingua franca
There have been other BBC radio progammes:
BBC Radio 4 - Word of Mouth, English As a Lingua Franca
It's growing everywhere:
English as a lingua franca - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Englisch als Lingua franca – Wikipedia
And there's some serious study of the subject as taught in the classroom:
How to teach English as a lingua franca (ELF) | British Council
English as a Lingua Franca - What is ELF?
But it's very much a 'mainstream' idea:
English is the lingua franca of Europeans as two thirds speak the language which has squeezed out all its rivals
- Two thirds of Europeans have at least working knowledge of English
- Not a single country where French was the preferred second language
- The dominance of English is likely to get greater
English has squeezed out every other language in the competition to become the common tongue of Europe, an EU report confirmed yesterday.
It found that English is the most popular foreign language in all but five European countries, and all of those are small nations that use the language of their larger neighbours.
Two out of three people across the continent have at least a fair working knowledge of English.
Growing and growing: Two thirds of people across the continent have at least a working knowledge of English
Not one country can be found where the preferred second language is French, once the language of international diplomacy and still the vehicle by which French governments try to promote their influence abroad.
French remains the European common language only in the offices of European institutions. It is one of the three working languages of the European Commission in Brussels, alongside English and German, and the main language of the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, alongside English.
The report published by the EU statistics arm Eurostat suggests that the dominance of English is likely to become even greater in the future.
It found that 94 per cent of secondary school pupils and 83 per cent of primary age pupils across the EU are learning English as their first foreign language, more than four times as many as learn French, German or Spanish. Only in Britain and Ireland is French the top foreign language in schools.
The findings raise a series of questions about the future of languages in the EU. They will deepen criticism of the way the EU spends an estimated £1 billion a year translating all of its documents into the 23 official languages of the bloc.
Understand? English has become the mother tongue in Europe
The popularity of English also opens the prospect of a difficulty if Britain should quit the EU. That would leave Brussels running a union whose real common language would be spoken as a native tongue only by the 4.6 million people of the Irish Republic - fewer than one in 100 of its population.
However, the swing towards English underlines the growing problem of the decline of language teaching in British schools and universities. It suggests the motivation for learning languages among native English speakers weakens when people can speak English wherever in the world they may go.
The report said: ‘The importance of English as a foreign language is confirmed among working age adults. In the EU, English was declared to be the best-known language amongst the population aged 25 to 64.’
Two thirds of adults knew English, with one in five of these saying they were proficient, 35 per cent spoke it well, and 45 per cent reckoned they had a fair command of English.
The findings, taken from the large-scale EU Adult Education Survey conducted in 2011, were published to mark the European Day of Languages, an event ‘to promote the rich linguistic and cultural diversity of Europe’ and to encourage language learning.
English was best known in Denmark, where 94 per cent of people speak it, and least in Italy, where 60 per cent know some English but only one in 10 people consider themselves proficient.
Other languages were more widely spoken only in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, neighbours of Russia and where there are many native Russian speakers, in Luxembourg, where German is an official language, and Slovakia, where many speak Czech.
English was the main language taught in schools outside the British Isles everywhere but Luxembourg, where the EU says German is a foreign language.
English is the lingua franca of Europeans as two thirds speak the language which has squeezed out all its rivals | Daily Mail Online
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