Will the European Union need English after Brexit?
The EU needs to find fair and efficient solutions to the many communication problems across its community. A shared language is the key.
The European Union will not be able to do what it needs to do without its people having a stronger sense of European identity. Not in the sense of an ethnos, a population unified by a single culture closely linked to a native language, but in the sense of a demos, a population united by the flow of information and arguments. For this, the EU requires a lingua franca.
For historical reasons, this language is and will remain English. Even after Brexit? Even more so after Brexit, when English will have a more neutral EU status, as it will no longer be the official language of one of the community’s larger member states.
The Brexit campaign was partly driven by the slogan: “Give us back our country!” Our slogan must now be: “Give us back our language!” English, which is a mixture of continental languages, is a European language. Let us reclaim it and speak it with our wide variety of European accents.
Bilingualism combined with English will give Europeans access to information and an advantage in discussions with anglophones. So, instead of just mumbling and grumbling in our respective languages, we should speak, write, publish and broadcast confidently — in English, so that we can be read and heard clearly throughout Europe and throughout the world.
Learning and using English as our lingua franca is not a betrayal of our national or cultural loyalties or our European identities. It is simply the instrument we need — from Göteborg to Nicosia and from Gdansk to Lisbon — to be able to communicate effectively with one another. Without such an instrument, there is no hope of creating a European democracy sufficiently strong to enable the European Union to do what it needs to do for all of us Europeans — and for humanity as a whole.
Our slogan must now be: ‘Give us back our language!’