Why is English the official language of the European Union when Great Britain isn’t even a member?
It gets better than that.
I work for a Swiss based company. We have facilities all over the world.
The four national languages of Switzerland are German, French, Italian, and Romansh. My Swiss colleague mainly speak German, French and English. I thought they spoke English just when us English speakers were around until I got my current job. I turns out the the official language of the company is English.
I have lost count of the times I have been working in non English speaking countries with the local guys and the manager has scheduled a meeting “Technical English” AKA Hey Paul what is this in English?
James Cobban
I attended a meeting in Paris at the headquarters of Air France. Everybody present was fluent in French. But because it was an engineering meeting it was entirely in English. However the moment we went to lunch, even though we continued discussing technical issues, the language switched to French, although I was asked to suggest English translations for French terninology.
Roland Bushell
One aspect of the English language that doesn’t seem to have been accounted for to date on this thread, is just when English emerged as a global standard. Internationally, the default language at the beginning of the 19th century was French. But that all changed with the industrial revolution. Which arguably originated in Great Britain.
While a case can be made for industrial innovation in many countries from the mid-18th century, what is absolutely certain is that from 1815 onwards, the manufacturers of Manchester, Liverpool, Cardiff, Glasgow and Dublin were outproducing just about everyone. Whose products were exported to the emerging markets created by European empire-builders. Along with technical manuals. In English.
There is another aspect too which is often overlooked. In 1815, an awful lot of sailors were released by the Royal Navy. During the Napoleonic wars, the Navy operated 600+ ships of the line. One month after the end of the war, 500+ of these were decommissioned. Mostly the people released by the navy transferred to a rapidly growing merchant marine. Again carrying their language with them.
One final contributory factor to the primacy of the English language can be carried forward another 100 years or so too. As British dominance in global trade waned from the beginning of the 20th century, the US emerged as a global trading superpower. Using English of course.
Kevin
When I was young we were told that historically, English was the language of trade, French was the language of diplomacy, Latin was the language of medicine etc.
Akidma
English is the most dominent language throughout the World.
Michael
When I used to visit my German Doctor, he got upset when I tried to use German. He wanted to practice English.
John Stephens
When I was stationed in Germany in the 70s, we had the same problem. A small group of us would walk into town. We would stop of at a very nice bar just at the edge of the town centre. We thought that if we did this we would get to know the locals in there and learn German with their help. Wrong, apart from the old men, they all wanted to practice their English. They would only speak to us in English.
Barry Brown
Meeting my new French partner, (now wife’s), family for the first time, I was concerned how my strangulated amateur schoolboy French would hold up. This was not a problem. They all wanted someone to practice their English upon!
John Fannon
In my experience the French do like to you make an attempt at speaking French.
Barry Birchall
Most of the world either speaks English or wants to. The downside is that we Brits and probably Americans are poor at second languages.
Dave Lowe
This English language dominance is simply because it has been the language of the most powerful and dominant country in the world for nearly 300 years, first with the British Empire and then the United States of America.
Willy Daglish
The great strength of English, as a lingua franca, is that, while difficult to speak fluently, it is easy to make oneself understood. When mistakes do occur, they are less likely to be catastrophic than in most languages.
Gary Tulie
I think its precisely because English is a lingua Franca that it has become gramatically simple. Older versions of the language had things like formal and informal forms of address but these things have disappeared in the modern language. I understand similar simplifications have occurred in Swahili (based on Arabic and widely spoken as a trade language in East Africa), and in French dialects spoken in West Africa. I imagine historically that international Greek and Latin would have changed in similar ways to facilitate use as a trade language.
Polly McGillagollyway
Modern English dates from around the Tudor period of history. So the “simplification” changes that you are thinking about had largely already occurred by then, and at that stage English was not even the Lingua Franca of the “British isles” (a new concept in the Tudor period).
Latin was still the Lingua Franca among the educated elite of the British isles at that time. So if an educated person from the south of England wanted to speak to an educated person in the west of Wales, or north of Scotland or Ireland they had the option to speak in Latin. Of course Latin had ceased to be a vernacular language in Britain 1,000 years before then, so they would have spoken in “classical” Latin. But where Latin had continued to be the vernacular it had since evolved into Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, French, Romanian, etc, with all their myriad dialects. And one of those offshoots, French, became the “Lingua Franca”, or language of international diplomacy, for several centuries, a position now held by English.
Polly McGillagollyway
English is just one of many hundreds of languages in the world. It doesn’t have linguistic qualities, or “strengths”, that are any different from any other language, that would not be possible. It has become the world’s current Lingua Franca due to the power, prestige and influence of the British empire up to the start of the 20th century, and the rise of American power, and the global spread of its cultural and technological influence since then.
American pre-eminence is beginning to decline, but English will probably remain a Lingua Franca for several centuries until it is eventually replaced by another language. But whatever that language is it will be heavily influenced by English, just as English vocabulary is 60% Latin due to the pre-eminence of the Roman empire 2,000 years ago, and the fact that Latin continued to be a Lingua Franca for centuries after Rome fell.
Anthony Kelly
The English vocabulary may be 60% Latin but they’re mostly words that most speakers rarely use. The commonly spoken English vocabulary is about 80% Germanic from the languages used by the Germanic people that started to occupy Britain from 500 AD. Accordingly, spoken and commonly written English is a Germanic language and is classified as such.
Polly McGillagollyway
Apparently not. If you count the technical vocabulary that most English speaking people never use the Latin (and Greek) derived content of English appears to rise to about 90%. The 60% figure is what I got for comprehensive, but normal, everyday English speech.
Of course, and as you say, English is a Germanic language, but whatever the percentage is, and whatever way it is calculated, it obviously has a very large dollop of Latin vocabulary. Welsh and Gaelic arrived in the British Isles long before either English or Latin and they also have a significant amount of Latin derived vocabulary (with Gaelic being less influenced as it mostly existed outside areas of Roman occupation 2,000 years ago). The English more or less arrived in Britain after the Romans left and the large Latin content of English is mostly due to the influence of the French speaking Normans. French is basically an evolution of Latin.
Gary Lenton
All the other countries in Europe learn English as a second language at school. In Holland I met a few older people who apologised to me because their English was so bad, then they spoke to me in near perfect English.
Dean Bennett
America, 
the only “major” country without a language!! English and Spanish. That must hurt!
Tim Modified
Media, technical, maritime, and aviation use English. Any non-English speaker, speaks English as a second language. When a German, French, Japanese, Chinese, Greek or other person meet, they will generally converse in English.
Pederos Hallam
Great Britain was never a member of the EU the UK was.
Neil Bowen
Great Britain, being 94% of the UK, definitely was a member. The country, after all, is the “United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland”.
Terry
It is debatable whether Northern Ireland is still in the EU. It is in a sort of limbo.
Roman Dobronovskyi
I work for a German company and all big meetings are in English.
Carpe Jugulum
Our “French” company has factories world wide and the official company language has always been English. It was only last year they aquired our British company, their first native English speaking company!
Roger Mewis
I was flight deck crew and the language spoken in all external communications, irrespective of nationality or country, was English.
Paul Ericson
Apart from the British having once taken their language around the world, any competent book on linguistics will confirm that English is the most efficient, versatile and comprehensive language on the planet. One can express more, more easily, and with more exactitude than in any other established language. It possesses the largest vocabulary of free-standing words (as opposed to characters expressing variants, which would probably be Chinese.
Owen Eather
As an Australian, doing much business in Asia, at one time or another it would have helped if I had some usage of Japanese, Cantonese, Putongwah, Bahasa and Thai. Every attempt by me to do so was swamped by the locals wanting to practice their English. I gave up.
A well known French business acaademic, in a regular column in the (English) Japan Times, once remarked on advice to his French postgraduate students;
“Publish in English or perish in French.”
Mark Collins
There is Ireland, which is still a member of the EU and which speaks English as its main language. I realize that this wouldn’t be enough to make English the go-to language, but then again neither would the UK’s membership have been enough on its own.
Essentially America is the reason. A lot of technical, financial, programming, and project management techniques and language were developed in America and then taught using English to others. Because so many people learned them in English, and because American television and cinema has also popularised English, there seems little point to the EU in trying to translate them into French, German or Spanish. That would also assume the EU would agree to use one of those languages uniformly and ensure it was taught in all schools. Because America has the effect of making English a neutral language, it’s easier for all EU states to agree on.
So I doubt the EU will stop using English, despite the French desire to increase the use of their own language as a substitute. Besides, the UK’s economy has been crippled by Brexit and the majority of people in the UK now want to rejoin (keyboard warriors, save your breath, this has been consistently proven in opinion polls going back well over 18 months). As soon as births and deaths changes the current quirk whereby the Brexit minority is distributed over the UK’s electoral districts in such a way as to overly-influence election results, the UK will set about properly rejoining and that’ll further justify the EU’s use of English in the future.
Christopher Webster
Britain had an empire that straddled the world. It was the biggest empire that the world has seen. English became the standard of course, and if other countries needed to deal with the empire then an ability to speak English was useful. As Britain declined in power and influence the United States of America took its place, and the USA spoke English. English remained the standard international language. French was once the language of diplomacy, but English became the language of commerce. The European Union recognises that English is the lingua franca.
David Brown
India has hundreds of languages, some of which are official at state level. At federal level, there are two languages: Hindi and English.
John Hill
It is odd that there is no exact English equivalent of ‘lingua franca’! �
Maureen Harwood
Actually, it is not ‘odd’. One of the strengths of English is its adaptability. It uses and absorbs words from other languages as appropriate. Large numbers of words come from India. Examples include: avatar, bandana, bungalow, jungle, juggernaut, and curry, some words go back to Sanskrit or Persian. Examples: Malaya e.g. amok; Africa e.g. banana, trek, banjo, bongo, jazz. So, other European languages especially from Latin or Greek, but really international.
Guy Forks
As much as it really pisses Macron off, English is still the official language of the EU. That is because English is the second language of most non native English speakers.
English is the most “widely spoken” language in the world; but it is not spoken by the “most number of people” in the world. That accolade goes to Mandarine Chinese.
Some years later I met up with a linguistic professor and told him of the difficulty that I had had in learning a new language. He told me that there was an area of the brain that was devoted to learning languages which tended to be more developed in most women than in most men. Hence most polyglots are female. He also mentioned that there is an area of the brain devoted to spacial awareness which tended to more developed in most men than in most women. Eureka! Now I understood why most women have difficulty parking a car!
Allan McKenzie
Similar in Belgium. The Wallonians don’t want to speak Vlaams (Dutch), and the Flemish don’t want to speak French – so business meetings are conducted in English. And have been since before the EU existed.
Charles Sibley
At least 25%-33% of the world speaks English as it’s first language.
(Fact check needed!)
Joe Buckley
I discovered that English is pretty much the only language spoken all over India. Although Hindi is official and the most widely spoken, there are regions where almost no one speaks it.
An Bradán Feasa
That’s because English has become the language of business, the reason this happened wasn’t because of military might or anything like that. It was because of trade. you see it’s always quite useful to be able to converse with your shopkeeper or banker, and the british became both the shopkeepers and bankers of the world through the vast trade networks they established during the days of their empire.
Tall Paul
Because the language of the internet is English.
Polly McGillagollyway
No, it’s not true. English is the common language of the UK and is used for all official purposes, so it is the “official” language of the UK.
What the QI researchers were probably thinking is that there is no single piece of British legislation that declares English to be the “official” language. But they were disregarding “real world” practice, and probably also missing some historical context (and being a bit “anglo-centric”). For example, other languages, apart from English, were banned from official use in parts of the UK, for example Irish in Ireland. I know that a particular ban on Irish was challenged in the Court of Appeal in Belfast a few years ago and the appeal was lost, so that the appeal judge confirmed that only English could be used in a court of law in Northern Ireland. So to that extent the QI researchers were wrong, as Northern Ireland is in the UK.
That was only a couple of years ago and I’m not sure if that centuries old law has been changed since then, but I am also aware that Welsh had been banned for some official purposes in Wales centuries ago. I assume those laws have long since been changed.
The point probably is that when English was specifically provided to be “official” language for parts of the UK, the UK was not entirely English speaking. It is now, and the absence of any specific laws saying it’s “official” is immaterial, as it is the official language.
Dave Arthur
Why not just ban every language other than English – Done!
Al H
Business language in Saudi Arabia is also Englsh due to many foreign nationals working there!!!
Captain Mouse Cat.
I have worked on many projects around Europe and the project language has always been English.
Richard Linnell
When I worked in Switzerland (French speaking part) all the people there spoke English. I worked for a British company, but while I was working in Switzerland we had a local secretary. We sometimes had visits from rep’s from the German speaking parts of Switzerland and other European countries. One day I asked her which language they spoke when they were together. She gave me a withering look and said ‘English of course’ as if I had asked her a very stupid question. I every place I have worked in Europe or Scandinavia, the company language has always been English, and everyone I worked with spoke it well – sometimes much better than many British people! It has lead to many British people being ‘language lazy’ (and that includes me) It was the reason we were able to work all over the world with ease, helped by the fact that much international legislation is also written in the English language.
Tony Olivari
German has no presence outside of Europe and even then mainly in Germany, French is spoken in some of their old colonies but many now have reverted to native languages like Arabic, Vietnamese, Cambodian. Italian was never widespread but English is spoken by nearly half the world as either a first or second language. Even in countries like India which are trying to use Hindi as the official language English is so useful worldwide that everyone that has ambition realises they have to speak it.
Adrian Tyler
I spend a lot of time abroad and it doesn’t matter where anyone is from, if they want any other nationality to understand them they speak English.
