Guardian Unlimited | The Guardian | The French language meets its Waterloo

[P. Kerim Friedman]

*The French language meets its Waterloo*

*Ian Black in Brussels
Wednesday March 20, 2002
The Guardian <http://www.guardian.co.uk>*

http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,3604,670492,00.html

Enlarging the EU is good news for the English language, confirming its
victory over French as the classic medium of European integration.

Adding to the woes of the French, who fear an Anglo-Saxon plot to get
the top jobs in Brussels and liberalise protected markets, a new survey
shows that the language of Shakespeare is more popular than that of
Molière in the candidate countries for union membership.

According to the European commission's polling arm, Eurobarometer, 86%
of people in the 13 countries applying to join regard English as one of
the two most useful languages to speak.

German is favoured by 58% per cent, largely in central and eastern
Europe, and French by a paltry 17%.

Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovenia, Estonia, Lithuania,
Latvia, Slovakia, Cyprus and Malta are expected to join the EU in an
unprecedented "big bang" in the next two to three years.

Bulgaria and Romania, whose economies are less developed, are likely to
take longer.

Turkey, the only one of the 13 not to have begun the complex accession
negotiations, may never make it.

"After years of armchair speculation about what the linguistic map of
Europe will look like after enlargement, this survey is the answer,"
commission official said.

"It spells the end of a rearguard action to preserve French as the
dominant working language."

English is the most-spoken foreign language in the candidate countries,
scoring 16% compared with 14% for Russian, 10% for German and 4% for
French.

The linguistic preferences reflect the fact that historically France has
played little part in the outer countries of Europe compared with its
role in the original six members of the EU's earlier manifestation,
European Economic Community.

Romania has most citizens who speak French as a second language, though
there too, English is considered far more useful.

Cyprus and Malta, both former British colonies, are special cases, where
57% and 84% respectively speak English as a second language.

Every new EU member's language is officially recognised, so within a few
years there will be 10 more to add to the existing 11, with a question
mark over whether Turkish will be required for Cyprus.

French dominated the European project from the 1950s until the 1980s but
was set back when Finland, Austria and Sweden joined in 1995, and has
suffered further from English's dominance on the internet. Today,
two-thirds of commission documents are written in English.