Following Brexit, there were all sorts of questions around the future status of the English language:
Jay Doubleyou: brexit and the english language
Jay Doubleyou: the future of the english language after brexit
Jay Doubleyou: the eu has no plans to downgrade the use of english after brexit
Jay Doubleyou: “slowly but surely english is losing importance in europe”
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But it seems that English is very much part of the European language landscape.
The Norwegians speak it perfectly:
Norwegian Comedy Vikingane Also Filmed In English – NORDIC DRAMA
Norsemen (Vikingane) Season 1 Official Netflix HD Trailer - YouTube
German speakers score higher than 'native speakers' of English in the IELTS test:
International English Language Testing System - Wikipedia
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So, perhaps we're seeing the emergence of 'European English' - something different to British or Irish or Indian English, as reported in the latest edition of the E L Gazette:
Professor Marko Modiano, of the University of Gävle, Sweden, argues that it’s time Europe’s own version of English becomes an acceptable alternative to British English
The European Union is now at a crossroads when it comes to the language regime promoted in Brussels. The plurilingual initiative has not resulted in greater numbers of EU citizens becoming functionally trilingual, nor has Erasmus produced significant numbers of college students becoming fluent in any of the lesser-used European languages.
Instead, what we are seeing across Europe is an intensification of resources being allocated to English and a reduction in the learning of traditional third languages (such as, for example, the decline of Swedish in Finland and an increase in bilingualism, with Finns speaking only Finnish and English).
Not only are greater numbers of EU citizens acquiring proficiency in English, they are also turning away from the traditional norm – standardised British English – and instead utilising more features, pronunciation, lexical items and grammar which are characteristic of American English. At the same time, aspects of language usage which are culture specific for European English, for example, in lexical use the term member state or the phrase the four freedoms in pronunciation the unique manner in which mainland Europeans pronounce words such as cooperation and, in grammar, the use of the present continuous where non-native- speaking English users use the simple present (saying “I am coming from Spain”, instead of “I come from Spain”), are becoming part and parcel of the unique way in which English is now used as a lingua franca in the European Union.
These processes of nativisation, which always take place when you have widespread use of a lingua franca in a multilingual speech community, are intensifying. Brexit – the withdrawal of the British from European unification – has actually acted to accelerate these processes, because with the British out of Europe there are no longer hordes of language watchdogs in the EU getting upset every time the EU does something which is not acceptable in the British rendition of the tongue. The Irish, the only remaining native-speaker nation state with any considerable numbers (some five million souls, which amounts to a bit more than 1% of the EU population) will not make any great effort to influence how mainland Europeans use their English for the simple reason that they have other fish to fry.
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