France plans to oust English language from EU meetings

Le Meow

[quote] But with Brexit leaving only Ireland and Malta as EU countries where English is an official language, its dominance could be at risk.

Official language means little, English is the most widely spoken language in Europe.

They blew it by waiting so long. If they did this 50 years ago, when French was still considered the diplomatic language of the world, it would have made sense to secure their position with this move. But now?

English is the easiest language to learn. It has no masculine/feminine words and you don't have 600 endings for each verb.

English does have a hell of a lot of words though. English was a whore, darlin'.

After the past several years, I wish I didn’t understand ANY language.

It's the UK who blew it. They could have been in on the ground floor of European integration and thought they were too powerful to bother. They thought their future lay with the US and with the Empire. Now they're a medium-sized economy who can't produce a product worth a damn who allowed their nationalist news media to fuck them by selling them fairy tales of their long-dead economic power.

France has every right to do it. Who says the future is in English anyway? Maybe it's in Mandarin.

The future might be Mandarin but it sure the hell isn't French.

Mandarin or Spanish.

[quote]Now they're a medium-sized economy who can't produce a product worth a damn

Hey, now. We export tossers. Ain't that enough?

Harry Windsor

James Corden

I appreciate their insouciance

[Quote]Who says the future is in English anyway? Maybe it's in Mandarin.

English will remain the cool lingua franca for the next century or so. No one is trying to replace it with culturally unrelatable Mandarin.

Like it or not, English is the recognized global language, kind of like the dollar is the global reserve currency. That may and can change, but France is simply being France and, sadly, reminding the world why people haven't generally liked them and why the French have often been seen as the more snobbish and moronic people, especially in Europe.

France won't even defend itself in war, and has literally allowed another culture, an aggressive culture and one that generally hates everything about the Western World, to completely take over its capital city. I was last in Parish in 2017. 2014 before that. And I remain shocked at just how dominant Muslims and radical Islam is over there. Just like in World War II, France laid down, too cowardly to control the situation or push-back, and has allowed itself to be dominated by a stray street bitch. And NOW they wanna be all bold and ballsy and shit and play the whole 'We Hate English' thing? Sorry cunts. Too late. You're ovah.

Le français est une langue de second ordre provenant d'un pays de troisième ordre qu'aucune personne sensée ne devrait jamais avoir à apprendre.

Very cool move.

With the UK gone, it makes more sense for Europe to choose a European language.

And yes we all know the importance and ease of English.

Unless the Chinese start taking over other countries and imposing itself on them like the British did, and it won't, Mandarin will never become a lingua franca. Just because a billion Chinese people speak it in China doesn't mean jack squat.

Oh R7, you're STILL butt-hurt over Brexit and want to damn the entire U.K. and British system because some voters made a decision your ass didn't like? They're hardly a "medium" economy and are still very much a World power. But keep trying to fuck that cat honey. As long as it makes you feel good.

Eh bien, sentez-les!

I say no subtitles or dubbing of American films and TV shows in French.

It doesn't affect the UK at all, R7.

English is the lingua franca.

Who knew?

[quote] lingua franca

Sounds rather dirty to me!

Why don't they use Esperanto? It was meant for this purpose! If they are willing to give diplomats French lessons why not give them Esperanto lessons which is an easier language anyway? I guess it's true that chauvinism still reigns supreme, everyone wants THEIR language to be spoken .You would think the EU would have sorted this problem out especially when Britain was part of it. Instead of making English the main language which subtly reinforced it's power and influence, they should have chosen a neutral language.

The UK is a world power???? HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHA.

Sorry.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHA.

Queen Elizabeth began her reign as the figurehead of a world-spanning empire and it's quite possible the UK will break up before she dies. Voters in Scotland and Northern Ireland are mad as fuck at blundering Boris and his fuckups and are eying their own exit.

Not sure why R17 is so horny for Brexit. Maybe his boyfriend left him for a Polish plumber.

Enjoy all that money the UK is saving! I'm sure National Health will be SO much better now!!

[quote[Voters in Scotland and Northern Ireland are mad as fuck at blundering Boris and his fuckups and are eying their own exit.

They'll never leave. The Scots are cheapskates and the Irish are drunks. Neither can self-govern.

Let them eat Brioche!

Bullshit sounds more romantic in French.

This will go as well as the French attempts at the vaccine. The French are good for one thing only, making others look better.

France is GANGSTA! That's how you do it!

On a different note, why would Scotland and Northern Ireland want to leave because of Boris and his fuckups? Wouldn't that make them happy as they are and more prone to stay?

The EU members with the best general knowledge of English among its population are the Nordic Countries (Denmark, Sweden, Finland), BeNeLux (Belgium, specifically northern Belgium/Flanders, Netherlands, Luxembourg), Austria and Germany. France, Spain and Italy have always been fairly abysmal (likewise southern Belgium/Wallonia). France is still living in the 17th century when it comes to the perceived global significance of the French language, bolstered in parts by their efforts to sustain French-language instruction in former colonies.

The French assign gender to nouns. How do you say ‘triggered’ in French?

The French are exhausting

No one, and I mean no one, out- cunts the French!

Merde!

Well - I understand the reasoning and it's another slap in the face for the Brits and their stupide Brexit decision.

However - this isn't going to make French more widely used. It's ceremonial.

This isn't going to have any impact on the use of English in Europe or anywhere else.

White arrogance eff I'll destroy you every time.

The fall of an empire is always something to behold as things continue to decline.

We both speak English better than the English.

The Chinese aren’t interested trying to have the entire world embrace and learn Mandarin. They teach their kids English from elementary school or earlier.

High-IQ people accept the reality of the world.

R32 I am fatty gay.

The EU is barely relevant. Now France seems to want to make the EU even more irrelevant. The big players in the world are the US, China, and Russia. Everyone else falls into a sidecar of one of these three big players.

And the rest of the world gives "le shrug."

R41, And continues to use English for all practical and important purposes.

The EU has the second or third biggest economy in the world, depending on the day. Russia is barely keeping its head above water. Its people are sick, drunk, old and dying. The reason they're a nation of criminals is because there's no other way to make a life in that godforsaken shithole. Their leaders are thieves and have picked the whole nation clean. They can cause trouble but can't do any real damage. They had fucking Trump in the White House and what was he able to do for them? Nothing.

Voters in Scotland have pretty firmly gone over to the SNP. They see a future being a part of Europe and they see nothing being tied to the angry old dummies in England who believe the shit they see on TV. It won't happen tomorrow, but it's coming.

Boris fucked Northern Ireland in the Brexit deal and they are NOT happy. There is still a cultural and (mildly) religious attachment to England among a slim majority of them, but given how the ROI is much less explicitly Catholic and much more prosperous that they used to be, uniting the whole island into one nation doesn't look so dangerous or scary.

The English fucked themselves. They're the irrelevant ones. Too small and poor to matter to America. Too much of a pain in the ass for the EU to deal with them.

You only have to watch Eurovision to understand the France's obsession with their language.

On comes the presenter, in front of a huge pic of the Eiffel Tower to remind you that she's (for it's always she, the embodiment of Mareianne) going to babble in French for her allotted 30 seconds in French to remind Europe that they, like Britain are a small country, batting above their weight on the global stage.

It's an anachronism to when the Berlin Wall was up and Europe really meant Western Europe. Time has moved on and with the growing significance of Eastern Europe no wonder, with the language of business being English, that French is being sidelined more and more.

R29, bumbling boris screwed it up bigtime. I just read about it yesterday. I'll give you a quick version from know nothing American.

The UK created a shitty Brexit agreement with the EU. Especially when it comes to Northern Ireland. Bumbling boris had some legal expert called Lord Frost create the Brexit agreement and he did a really shitty job, especially when it comes to trade with Northern Ireland. boris boasted that “Northern Ireland has got a great deal." Boris also lied by saying, it "would not require costly and burdensome checks on trade across the Irish Sea" In boris's defense, he may just have been too fucking stupid to know what was in the agreement or even know what goes into trading (he's just like trump, who knew insurance was so difficult?).

But come to find out, there's a ton of paperwork required because of the shitty Brexit agreement. The Brits don't want to do all the paperwork, so they aren't sending much over to Ireland. It's gotten so bad that Ireland has a severe shortage of food, medication, vaccines.

And there's even more paperwork requirements that boris & frost are hoping to delay for 6 months. The EU is saying, "no, we can't trust the UK, fix it now and base it on EU laws". frost is saying, the EU needs a needs to stop being "legal purists" by wanting to follow a legal contract and should "trust their friends and neighbors" in the UK. How funny is that?

Also complicating things is the U.S, who signed the Good Friday peace talks in Northern Ireland many years ago. Part of that required the U.S to make sure England/UK doesn't fuck over Ireland. The G7 Summit is next week and Biden is expected to tell the UK, don't even think of screwing over Northern Ireland and that the UK's trade agreement with the U.S will be in jeopardy if they do

Do nouns in French get to declare their preferred pronouns?

Apoio totalmente essa decisão!

Inglês é uma língua bárbara e não deveria ser usada em contextos diplomáticos.

I'm glad that I learned English as my first language. There are more irregulars than regulars, more exceptions than rules. And pronunciation, e.g.,Through Thought, Though, Trough. Most other languages, if it's written, it's pronounced. Not like English and French, where whole strings of letters are silent or have the aforementioned irregular pronunciations. On the plus side, at least English is not gender-specific like most European languages, so you don't have to waste a lot of memory matching up articles, subject, object, pronouns, etc.

Regardless of what France wants the Fourth Reich ultimately will shift to deutsche Sprache.

[quote] Already, letters arriving from the European Commission in English go unanswered. “When a [French] commissioner receives a letter in English, we wait for the French version before we hand it over to Paris,” an EU diplomat told The Telegraph, in French.

They really are whiny little babies aren't they. Anyway France is only the second biggest EU economy if he wants to wean the Eastern bloc off preferring English he'd be better trying to encourage German. There's no way French has a hope of taking off in Poland, the Baltics, or Balkans because there's no economic or cultural incentive for them to bother.

Makes sense.

What, no SoCal Valley Gurl-speak?

When Macron throws a hissy fit or lusts after PM Sánchez of Spain, what will his French version of "Ooh gurrllll" be?

Isn't this just Macron playing to the French public, who are becoming very unhappy with him and are lurching to the right? I mean shouldn't he be more worried about the terrorist attacks that happen in Paris than be concerned about what language everyone is speaking at an EU meeting?

R54, how DARE you malign the religion of peace?

r54 Becoming? They've been rioting since his presidency started. Its only about 2 years since the taxi drivers tried to burn down Paris, and he only even won the election because he scooped up the centrist vote of everyone who didn't want president Le Pen. But yes lets make everyone speak French will probably play well with right-wing voters.

It's so weird the way online right-wing trolls base their stupid criticisms on the idea that a person or a government can only do one thing at a time. Like "shouldn't Macron be FIGHTING TERRORISM rather than do this????" Sweetie, the directive to do this probably took all of three minutes out of his day. Honestly, this decision probably didn't make it up to Macron's level.

Macron got his face slapped today. Lesson learned: don’t go walking among the peasants.

Viva la revoluccion!

"The Slappening", at a theatre near you.

It must have been a DLer who was annoyed that English was being replaced.

Ha! As soon as the French hear foreigners speaking French they become even nastier which is quite an achievement. Well they enjoy enormously being nasty in any case.

You can't blame them for being nasty. They're not Germany, they're not the UK, they're just the other European country.

Why were the French given a portion of control of Berlin after WW2?

Because the British didn't want to be the only ones responsible financially for feeding the Germans and rebuilding Germany. Also, the British (incorrectly) saw their future with the Empire and wanted to be rid of European burdens. They wanted the French to be the ones responsible for policing the Continent.

They didn't realize how weak and broke they were and how quickly their power was going to drain away. They didn't realize their future was with Europe.

R13. Yes, Paris looks like Birmingham now. And the main plaza in Birmingham looks like a Taliban settlement.

R63 The main reason was that France's elevated status was expedient to the USSR. Stalin needed an ally against the US and France was the best option - it still had a significant empire, was relatively strong militarily, and DeGaulle had realized he needed Soviet support so had actively pursued a strategy which kept France on the periphery of the American sphere of influence,

At the same time, the UK had neither desire nor ability to police Europe - they faced the monumental task of rebuilding the country while Empire was virtually bankrupt (and had been since the First World War) and independence movements were springing up all over the place. On top of that, Churchill was skeptical that the US would stick around after the war so peace keeping would fall to the UK. That meant another continental power needed to be established.

France is the cultural capital of the world. Jealous, bitches?

Alors, jamais je l'ai fait!?!

Is this why that guy slapped Macron?

Haha so true R61. I have a terrible Detroit accent and ordering a "crasawnt" enraged the guy behind the counter. I was going to take french lessons for my next trip but fuck it. We agree to loathe each other.

R63, the British insisted that France be given an occupation zone after Germany had surrendered, because France had been Britain’s original ally since the start of the war. Churchill admired De Gaulle very much (despite, or perhaps because of, De Gaulle’s supreme arrogance) and wanted to shore up his legitimacy, especially because the French communists had played a big role in the resistance and Churchill worried that De Gaulle was the only one who could take control of the country from them. Churchill was very worried by the communist advance across most of Europe, and extremely frustrated by FDR’s conviction that the US could come to an arrangement with Stalin and trust him to share power.

Churchill’s nightmare scenario was that France would fall within the Soviet zone of interest. That would have made it much more likely that the whole of Germany would have turned communist. Once victory was assured, Churchill’s strategy was to limit The Soviet threat. One way he did this was to support De Gaulle. Another was to encourage British troops to concentrate on sweeping across the far north of Germany and cut off Schleswig-Holstein before the Russians reached it. That meant that Britain liberated Denmark and Norway instead of the The Russians, and were able to guarantee that the Baltic remained open to allied shipping.

Sorry but Churchill was turned out on his ass before any of those decisions had been made.

R72 Churchill was turned out on his ass, as you so elegantly put it, in July 1945. The decision on 4 zones of occupation (including France), was taken in Yalta in February 1945, where it was agreed that France would be given an occupation zone made up of areas previously assigned to The UK and US in the London Protocol of the previous year.

At Yalta, Churchill also insisted that the French should be a full member of the proposed Allied Control Council for Germany.

J. Loree Jeeflay.