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[nomad soul]

After Brexit, EU English will be free to morph into a distinct variety
The Guardian | 25 September 2017
Source: https://www.theguardian.com/

If your planification isn’t up to snuff, you might need to precise your actorness. English in the EU, spoken primarily by non-native speakers, has taken on a life of its own. While “planification” might be jargon unlikely to pop up outside of Brussels, there are also changes afoot in more everyday spoken English in Europe.

“Actorness” and a multitude of other examples are listed in “Misused English words and expressions in EU publications”, a guide published by European Court of Auditors senior translator Jeremy Gardner. The guide details many of the ways in which European English has gone a bit wibbly – to a native speaker’s ear, at least. In some cases, words like “agent” are deployed in contexts that would sound fine to a US speaker, but odd to the British or Irish ear. And these are precisely the ears that EU documents should be catering to, Gardner argues: “Our publications need to be comprehensible for their target audience … and should therefore follow a standard that reflects usage in the UK and Ireland.”

Following Brexit, the UK will no longer be able to call these kinds of shots. In a paper published in the journal World Englishes last week, linguist Marko Modiano speculates about what this is likely to mean for the future of English in Europe. He argues that the newfound neutrality of English is likely to help it survive Brexit – and that without the UK’s clout in Europe, European English will be free to do what language does best: change.

See the full article.

[scot47]

For many years now, English has been a common "lingua franca" in intra-European communications. This has encouraged the Anglophones to forget about the undoubted benefits of learning foreign languages.


Personally I regard the acquisition of two foreign languages as a necessary part of a liberal education. One of them should be an inflected language like Latin, Russian or German. This is best done in childhood. It is not going to happen in state schools as currently configured. My advice is to send your children to Eton or Cheltenham.

[In the heat of the moment]

[Teacher in Rome]

I really don't understand why Latin is considered so important. (This is not a snarky question - I'm genuinely interested.) Some students here in Italy study both Latin and Ancient Greek, but they don't seem to be any more proficient with English (or other languages, including German) than students who don't study Latin / Greek.

[In the heat of the moment]