Talk:European Commissioner for Multilingualism

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[edit] policy

One of the practices suggested to the commissioner is that each EU citizen should adopt another EU language, and not necessarily a major one, nor one spoken in a neighbouring state.

Since linguistics has found that no language is superior to any other, there is nothing intrinsically wrong with choosing any particular language as a lingua franca. Since language is organic and seldom susceptible to manipulation by government and academies, it is best to go with the flow of linguistic development. In the case of the EU (and of much of the rest of the world) English has become the lingua franca and it would be impossible to topple it from that position.

Rather than having the unrealistic objective of making EU citizens multilingual, it would be better to aim to make them all bilingual in English and one other language, in most cases their national language. Those of us for whom English is our mother-tongue would be encouraged to learn another world language, which I suggest is French because of its European and global presence. German may be widely spoken in Europe but it has little presence elsewhere. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 80.189.103.145 (talk) 14:40, 27 April 2008 (UTC)