Grin Report supports Esperanto for European Union

[Harold F. Schiffman]

The Grin Report supports Esperanto for European Union

Posted by Dr.Esperanto on February 15th, 2007 filed in Esperanto

An open letter from Lingvo sent to the European Parliament defending the
adoption of one language, Esperanto, for the EU: We pay 17 THOUSAND
MILLION each year into the British economy!

Dear Member of Parliament,

October 2005 saw the publication of a particularly interesting report,
accessible in French in PDF Format, by the Swiss Professor Franois Grin.
The most startling conclusion of the report is that, due to the current
dominant position of the English language, the United Kingdom gains 17-18
thousand million each year, which is more than three times the famous
British rebate, or 1% of its GNP. In other words, each of the 394 million
non-English-speaking citizens of the EU, including those from the poorest
new Member States, are subsidising the British economy!

This amount comes from the sale of books and other goods relating to the
English language, from the 700.000 people each year who go to Britain to
learn English, as well as from the savings that stem from the neglect of
foreign-language teaching in British schools. This does not account for
all of the languagerelated economic transfers to the United Kingdom but
for 75% of them, which the author sees as the fruit of the hegemony of
English and not just of the demographic weight of the language itself.
Franois Grin who is a professor at the University of Geneva and a
specialist in the economics of language, has released an extensive dossier
in which he analyses the language policy of the European Union. The study
was commissioned and published by the French Haut Conseil de lvaluation de
lcole (High Council for School Evaluation) - an independent public body
which evaluates and analyses the state of teaching in France.

The report poses the question What would be the optimum choice for working
languages in the European Union? A more equitable system would save the EU
at least 25 thousand million annually!

The Swiss economist proposes a comparison between three possible
scenarios:

1. English as the sole language,
2. multilingualism,
3. Esperanto as an internal working language the EU institutions.

The third option, Esperanto, comes out as the least expensive and most
equitable, but Grin believes it is not currently viable because of the
strong prejudices against Esperanto based on simple ignorance. He
believes, however, that it is strategically possible for a new generation,
on two conditions:

a sustained large-scale information campaign throughout the EU about
language inequality and Esperanto,

the cooperation of all Member States in the campaign.

This could lead to net annual savings for the EU of approximately 25
thousand million! That is directly and manifestly to the advantage of 85%
of the population of the 25 states, Professor Grin claims.

PDF version of Grin's report is at
http://cisad.adc.education.fr/hcee/documents/rapport_Grin.pdf

http://english-esperanto.com/Europe/2007/02/15/the-francois-grin-report-supports-esperanto-as-european-unions-best-option/

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