At a press conference in May 2017, Jean-Claude Juncker, outgoing president of the European Commission, quipped “Slowly but surely, English is losing importance”, before switching to French for the main part of his speech. Clearly, he was having a dig about the UK’s withdrawal from the EU, which, by 2017, was already proving to be an exhausting, tedious process for all sides.

I happened to watch this speech live and I quickly searched the web for news of the spontaneous withdrawals from the EU of both Ireland and Malta that I assumed had taken place that day. After all, English is an official language in both these EU member states.

For much of the EU’s history, English, alongside French and German formed a trinity of working languages of the union. Since the 2004 enlargement of the EU to incorporate the new members from the former Eastern Bloc, there has been a shift in the equilibrium from English, German and French to English as the more dominant language used throughout the EU.

English has become a lingua franca within the EU. In some companies in Belgium, for example, it is the neutral option, a linguistic pressure valve to counter French-Vlaams tensions in the workplace. Multinational pharmaceutical companies typically use English as a common language across EU affiliate sites. Within a single affiliate location of a multinational pharma company, such as in Amsterdam or Barcelona, it is not unusual to have native English-speaking line managers, VPs and other staff and where English is the common language for internal and external communications.

A total of 66% of EU citizens can speak a foreign language. Outside of the UK, Ireland and Malta, 51% of EU citizens speak English as a second language, compared to 12% who have acquired French and 11% who are competent in German as foreign languages.

The evidence of the entrenchment of English as a lingua franca for generations to come is in the focus of schools’ foreign languages curricula across the EU. In lower secondary schools, 97% of students study English as a foreign language, compared to 34% and 23% who study French and German, respectively. In primary schools, 79% of EU children start learning English, compared to 4% who learn French at this stage. Over 80% of documents published by the European Commission have been authored in English first, then translated into EU member state languages. Across the union, there are over 8000 university courses that are taught in English.

After the UK’s withdrawal from the EU, on continental Europe, outside of Ireland and Malta, English as a lingua franca could well take on a life of its own. This has already been happening for some years now. Sociolinguists have identified the emergence of EU English as a distinct variety of English. This can either be the ‘top-down’ variety, the English used in EU governance, as embodied and codified in the ‘English Style Guide’, published for authors and translators working in the EU Commission. Or, it can be of the ‘bottom-up’ variety, the forms of English used in real life as a lingua franca by native speakers of mutually unintelligible languages.

The latter in particular is developing its own features, such as the consistent use of ‘informations’ and ‘competences’. Some of these features are distinct from native English varieties, such as UK or Irish English. There are mountains of text from package leaflets, IFUs or Patient-Reported Outcomes developed on continental Europe that I have seen that have been written in a distinct EU English style, where it is clear that no native English speaker has been involved in the development of these documents, yet they can be well understood. I always felt that aspects of the QRD template for package leaflets, while understandable to an English reader, jar just slightly with a native, like myself. Understandable, but just something not quite right. More about this in other articles.

Would EU English become nativized in the sense that it becomes the first language of children born to parents who speak EU English to each other? I doubt it, although it is possible that it could be picked up in infancy as a second language. In our company, we routinely perform cognitive debriefing studies of Clinical Outcomes Assessments (COA) for English varieties such as English for Israel, English for the United Arab Emirates, English for Singapore, and so on. Perhaps there is a case for developing and testing COAs for English of the European Union.

By Mark Gibson, Health Communication Specialist

1st September 2019, United Kingdom

References:

English in the EU. Lingua Franca. The Economist, 13 May 2017
English Style Guide, European Commission, 30 August 2019 https://ec.europa.eu/info/sites/info/files/styleguide_english_dgt_en.pdf
Charlemagne. A Brexit dividend. The Economist, 1st June 2019

The use of English in the post-Brexit European Union