THE European Union has a single currency, but what about a single language? Since its inception, the EU has made each member state's language one of its official tongues. Recently, even Irish, spoken at home by only a tiny minority, was granted full official status.
But the EU's posture as a protector of linguistic diversity cannot hide the stampede towards English that is underway. Throughout the EU, as in much of the world, from the Indian subcontinent to large parts of Africa, English increasingly functions as the language of international communication.
Nowadays, fewer languages are used in the EU's backrooms when meetings are less formal and the participants not all that prestigious. When EU officials meet together or draft internal documents, they use only the "working languages": French and, more often, English.
The predominance of English is even more pronounced in communications among the EU's citizens, where it is the first foreign language in all countries of the "old" Europe. Among the EU's new members, English is rapidly replacing Russian as the most widely used foreign language.
Nine out of 10 schoolchildren in the EU now learn English. Roughly half as many learn French, a quarter German and an eighth Spanish, and these numbers are falling, despite the Commission's efforts, because people tend to choose the foreign language that they believe is spoken and studied the most by others.
But, while the presence and pressure of English has a striking impact on the vocabulary of the home language, it leaves the syntax, grammar, and pronunciation almost entirely unaffected. Unlike the indigenous languages that were pushed aside by the languages of the European colonizers, the official languages of the EU are "robust": they are equipped with grammars, dictionaries, archives, libraries, and linguistics faculties. As a result, English will not so easily marginalize European languages, even after a large majority of the population has learnt it. But English and national languages can co-exist only if the state protects the indigenous language and citizens do not allow English to take over all prestigious domains.
The diversity of Europe is indeed innate, but its unity is yet to be achieved. The commitment to European integration requires a common vernacular, and that is English. The challenge for Europe is to use English as such an instrument, while avoiding submersion in American and British culture.
