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Each EU country nominates one official language for the EU, otherwise we'd have Catalan, Breton, Kashubian and many more.
by przemub 11mo ago
Each EU country nominates one official language for the EU, otherwise we'd have Catalan, Breton, Kashubian and many more.
- pasc1878 11mo agoWhich country nominates English? The obvious suspects are Ireland and Malta which have nominated non English languages so it is not them.
- gambiting 11mo agoWell I can only assume that when UK departed the EU, English wasn't removed automatically even though no country remaining in the EU nominates it as their official language of choice.
- OJFord 11mo agoThe UK was not a founding member of the EEC which preceded it, I don't know and haven't easily been able to find out, but it wouldn't be that surprising if the European Parliament already used English as a common language for policy etc. (In fact to strengthen that probability, if it had been say French, when and why would it have switched go English? Just because the UK joined?)
- ranc1d 11mo agoIrish and English are both official languages in the Republic of Ireland. Irish is the first official language and English being the second. https://www.irishstatutebook.ie/eli/2003/act/32/enacted/en/pdf https://www.irishstatutebook.ie/eli/2003/act/32/enacted/en/p...
- pasc1878 11mo agoRead the comment I replied to? It says that each country can only request ONE language. And Ireland requested Irish.
- rsynnott 11mo agoThey could get Austria to do it, as it presumably has a spare slot.
- outside1234 11mo agoThis raises an interesting question. Is there only one dialect of German in the LLM? My understanding is that the German German and Austrian German dialects are significantly different.
- ipsi 11mo agoWhen spoken? Almost certainly. But I think they mostly write in Hochdeutsch, especially in formal contexts, at least that I've seen (private chats/etc are a totally different matter), so I don't foresee any major issues there.
- lxgr 11mo agoAustrian standard german is slightly different from the German variant, even when written. The differences are pretty minor, though, so it’s very possible to have a relatively long text without being able to tell which one it actually is (especially when potatoes are not referenced in it).
- eru 11mo agoWell, even without any government mandates, ChatGPT is very happy to give you lots of dialects of English (and many other languages, too). Just ask for it. Eg it does a passable impression of Singapore's Singlish.
- thayne 11mo agoNot a native, but from what I understand, austrian german is pretty similar to what is spoken in southern Germany, but northern germany is significantly different.
- hebelehubele 11mo agoMy German teacher always claimed that Swiss German and German German (Hochdeutsch) were so different that she needed subtitles to understand it, and she didn't understand why they weren't considered separate languages.
- piltdownman 11mo agoIncluding the nasty political side-show that is Ulster Scots - literally only brought in as a chilling effect 'whataboutism' to diminish support when Irish speakers ask for language rights in Northern Ireland. https://www.reddit.com/r/northernireland/comments/1fivtob/nothing_will_convince_me_ulster_scots_is_a/ https://www.reddit.com/r/northernireland/comments/1fivtob/no...
- pqtyw 11mo agoWell Scots is a real language. As much as English or any other. Whether enough people speak it especially in NI to justify it having an official status and such is another matter.
- AlecSchueler 11mo agoThis completely ignores the history of published writing in Ulster Scots going back centuries.
- wizzwizz4 11mo agoThis is one of those topics where the Hacker News take is unlikely to be correct. There's a lot of strong feeling here, and an outsider would need at least three books to understand the historical context (one of which, afaict, has not been written yet: it's oral tradition only). People closer to the issue are better-placed to gather the necessary information, but again: strong feeling. Most people find it hard to get past that. The most informed person I know is so biased that I don't at all trust their conclusions.
- AlecSchueler 11mo agoWhat do you think is the Hacker News take?
- rgblambda 11mo agoPart of the issue some people take with Ulster-Scots is that the current official 21st century literature doesn't read anything like the historic literature, which English speakers can easily read and understand. It's often made up of slang terms and archaic spelling, in an attempt to be as different as possible to English. Native speakers have complained that official documents and signage in Ulster-Scots are incomprehensible to them.
- Levitz 11mo agoWell, this was 4 days ago, Spain in talks with Germany regarding the addition of official languages: https://www.politico.eu/article/catalan-basque-galician-boost-friedrich-merz-pedro-sanchez-team-up-brussels/ https://www.politico.eu/article/catalan-basque-galician-boos...
- foxglacier 11mo agoIf you can't find a common language within your own country, you shouldn't get to be one country.
- victorbjorklund 11mo agoGo back and tell the founding fathers of america that. Not everyone in america was english speakers.
- coldtea 11mo agoNo, but everyone in the US was made, practically and in some ways officially, to become an english speaker.
- Symmetry 11mo agoThey're children were taught in schools that ensured that they learned English but many adult immigrants never learned to speak English. Carnegie Steel used to try to avoid having too many workers with a common language as part of a strategy to make unionization more difficult. And when Norman Borlaug was growing up in Saude, Iowa in the 1920s there were still a lot of older people around who only spoke Norweigen.
- rvba 11mo agoI think English was not set as an official language since... Trump? It was the de facto language, but not the official language. What was baffling.
- victorbjorklund 11mo ago
- runarberg 11mo agoIs English a legacy official language then from the time the UK was a member (I‘m guessing Ireland nominated Irish instead of English). Aside it feels very un-EU to push this limitation, as I was under the assumption that EU was all about celebrating (European) diversity.
- handelaar 11mo agoStill an official language, thankfully. Officially, because of Cyprus.
- globular-toast 11mo agoWhy Cyprus? Their official languages are Greek and Turkish.
- handelaar 11mo agoBecause they also recognise English and Greek's already covered by Greece.
- Muvasa 11mo agoMalta and ireland
- adastra22 11mo agoBut if you’re only allowed one official language to add to the mix, they’d surely pick Maltese and Irish.
- skissane 11mo agoThe history here is more complex than that… originally Irish was not an EU language because Ireland just used English… then as part of one the cycles of EU treaty renegotiation, Ireland successfully pushed for it to be made a secondary EU language… and then later successfully pushed for it to be upgraded to full status… so Ireland actually has two EU languages, their original one (English) and their newer one (Irish). Because the practical reality is everyone in Ireland is fluent in English-around 60% of Irish people can’t even speak basic Irish, and fluent Irish speakers is <10% of the population Also, English remains one of the main working languages of the EU bureaucracy, because for many EU states (especially in Eastern Europe) it is a more popular foreign language than the other two (French and German)-when Czech diplomats need to talk to Spanish diplomats, English is the language they choose. This idea people have here that “each country gets to nominate a language” isn’t how it actually works. The treaties just contain a list of languages, and which languages are in the list is down to diplomatic negotiations not any coherent principle.