should French, or German, be the common European language?

Question

which of these two should be adopted as the common language for the EU? how long should the rest of us get to learn it before our own languages are dropped?

Answer 1

Neither. I think the sound of the German language is harsh, guttural, and it offends my sensibilities.
French requires the speaker to become nasally proficient. How about Italian. It is neither guttural, or nasal, It flows musically, has a colorful flourish, much like the Italian population, and has a happy sound.

Answer 2

There will be no common European language. The EU's policy is multi-lingualism. They've just added Irish as an official working language bringing the number to 21. Business in the EU institutions are normally conducted in these languages or in the big three French, German and English. You have to remember English is the third smallest mother tongue in Europe since Ireland and the UK are the only native speakers. It costs the EU €1.17Billion a year. Or €2.58 per year. I think thats not a waste of money ensuring a monolingual behemoth occurs that can decimate other cultures.

Answer 3

I'm French but honest,I think French is way much too complicated to be EU official language,same for German,common sense should prevail,English is an easy language to learn and speak,learning English should be made mandatory to learn in every single country across the world so at least we could all understand each other,beside,it's always nice to learn a foreign language,whether it's Chinese or Russian or whatever....

Answer 4

Being as most people speak English and it is the language used by airlines then English it should be. Not many in Europe speak French or German unless you are actually from both of those countries.

We managed to fight the EU on the pounds and ounces dont tell me we are going to have to fight to keep our own language too.

Answer 5

As there are only 60m and 85m native French and German speakers respectively in Europe, with only around 15% of the rest of Europe having a decent grasp of French and I'd guess 5% for German, compared with 60m native English speakers and 50% of Europe able to speak English.....

Answer 6

do u smoke crack? there are four alphabets in addition to 50 or so languages in europe, how could people who speak russian be expected to learn the german language let alone drop the cyrillic alphabet and learn the latin one
my great grandparents came to america from macedonia and the language used the cyrillic alphabet, they were here for over 50 years and spoke english but could never read or write because its a whole different fuckin alphabet

Answer 7

Are you crazy? Common language for the EU?

Answer 8

Like it or not,English is the closest thing to an international language. Wherever a single common language is required, ie air-traffic control, English is chosen.
My brother in law is a scientist, working in the commercial sector; he tells me at international meetings of scientists, everyone speaks English. And so on.
Having said that, I do think the English are incredibly lazy about languages, and we should all learn at least one extra one.

Answer 9

If it wasn't unintelligent, this Q would actually be funny. The one thing that Europe is proud of, and rightly so, is its multicultural and closely with it, multilingual society, the society of equal partners. And you would wipe these efforts just like that, by introducing a common language?! Where are you from? Anchorage, Alaska?

Answer 10

Neither: English is already the world's choice as second language.