That's assuming that the language will still be called English anything. It might as well split into American, Australian, British, etc. We don't call French or Spanish modern Latin, do we?
There's also an interesting split occurring with continental Euro-English, which is primarily being spoken by non-native speakers as a lingua franca. The divergence is presumably going to accelerate after Brexit, now that there's even fewer native speakers around to anchor it to British English.
As a linguist, there is no such dialect of English as 'Euro English'. The idea is borderline non-existent outside of Wikipedia.[0]
In order for there to exist a dialect there must exist some kind of stable distinguishing features, and 'Euro English' has none. The errors that a French speaker makes in English are completely unlike the errors a Greek speaker makes in English, which in turn are completely unlike the errors Czech speakers make in English. What are the stable realisations of the usual English lexical set words (e.g. KIT, DRESS, TRAP etc.) in 'Euro English'? What is the internal grammatical system of 'Euro English'? What are its tenses? What is its syntax? No one has any answers for these questions, which should be trivial to answer for a living dialect.
The highest evidence that the Wiki article can point to is a few items of jargon in European bureaucracy, but this for a dialect does not make. Any random larger organisation is going to have its jargon, particularly a legal one. A staffer on the Hill might have good scuttlebutt about Tuesday's pen and pad, but that doesn't mean there's some kind of emerging dialect of English forming in the halls of US Congress.
It's fine to use 'Euro English' to refer to the few lexical items used in the European bureaucracy, but a few items of jargon are neither unusual, nor sufficient to constitute a dialect.
[0] It's worth noting the most frequently cited source on that Wiki page is a click-baity newspaper article from a British tabloid (Brexit could create a new ‘language’), and that, of the three (!) articles in the bibliography, one treats it solely as a legal jargon, and the other two (Mollin 2006 and Forche 2012) actually reject the idea that Euro English is a dialect. Someone's just on a bit of a frolic on Wikipedia.
It's an interesting page, but I think at the moment it only summarizes common errors of english-as-second-language speakers of other European languages. But there might be a pattern there.
Also I doubt that there is a continuity between the mentioned Erasmus students and staff in the European-union for example. I would assume that's a later addition to the wikipedia article when the most likely subject of Euro english is about patterns of the use of english-language in the EU bureaucracy. Maybe a better title would be EU-administrative English or something of the like.
What's not so often talked about is of course that the pronunciation of english by non-native speakers is different and I do think there is tendency for some convergence among some aspects of pronunciation that I observe in meetings and zoom calls at work. Aspiration of consonants, clearer separation of individual words. The result is that native-speakers - while being more eloquent in English which puts them at some advantage - sometimes have a disadvantage because their advanced use of language is not understood well. IIRC MTV Europe realized that british hosts wouldn't be understood across europe, when english-speaking french/german/italian hosts would.
I think that's about right, yeah - in my experience international gatherings in Europe tends to converge on a sort of continental pidgin English where you shave off all the difficult aspects and end up with this very clear and crisp shared language that's more mutually understandable for everyone involved than any of the ordinary 'native' variants of English.
I think what's less clear is how consistent these convergences are. Certainly I have noticed colloquialisms and alterations to better fit romance and germanic languages that pop up again and again, but at what point does it get consistent enough to be its own 'thing' and not just a handy linguistic tool fashioned for the task at hand?
I would say if German english (Denglish) would pick up French english Idiosyncracies and vice versa, so if the speech patterns aren't just a result of making mistakes in a foreign language, but if they are acquired by other speakers. The Euro-English article gives as an example of Euro-English "Planification" for "Planning" which seems to stem from french / spanish https://fr.wiktionary.org/wiki/planification . So if the Germans start using planification they would have learned it from the french/spanish Euro-english speakers (I never heard "Planifikation" in German although its actually a word in the dictionary, I looked it up). And that would mean that certain Euro-English features propagate throughout Europe and are more than just Denglish/Frenglish/Swenglish and more than just English-learners messing up vocab/grammar.
While we are talking about language, there definitely are also those folks who move abroad and after a few years when they return they have picked up peculiarities of the language of their host country. The daughter of a neighbor moved to Paris for example and after a few years she started to sound more french. Still spoke perfect german but with an accent. Similarly a coworker who is a US expat in Germany told me he caught himself using some Denglish constructions.
> , based on common mistranslations and the technical jargon of the European Union (EU) and the native languages of its non-native, English-speaking population. It is mostly used among EU staff, expatriates and migrants from EU countries, young international travellers (such as exchange students in the EU's Erasmus programme) and European diplomats with a lower proficiency in the language.
This sounds niche, scattered and irrelevant as far as language making goes. Erasmus students and expatriates? EU staff?
It seems that you need some sort of concentration (virtual or geographical) to make a supposedly second-rate variation of some language. I don’t see how people from all across “continental” Europe which are also so scattered domestically (Erasmus students?) could make something cohesive enough to call it Euro English.
- A Spaniard might say “how you say” but would a Polish person do that?
- A Polish person might drop a lot of articles but would a Spaniard do that?
I’m from Scandinavia and a supposed mistake that people from the Nordic countries commit is to use “blue-eyed” to mean “naive”. And sure that’s a direct translation of the “naive” expression but I have never heard anyone from Scandinavia say that in English.
I see the footnotes for the opening paragraphs are The Independent, the Financial Times and a British linguist. I don’t know what the deal is with the British (similar to Americans but their distance from Europe excuses them IMO) and their insistence that Europe (really “Continental Europe” i.e. Europe which isn’t a bus drive under the English Channel away from the mainland) consists of this uniform blob of non-Anglos who drive scooters, eat baguettes and go to raves. And speak the same pidgin apparently.
> The divergence is presumably going to accelerate after Brexit, now that there's even fewer native speakers around to anchor it to British English.
That’s a laugh. Language isn’t spread by way of EU diplomats. Regular people are more likely to be “anchored” to American English.
One Czech guy I was talking to recently sounds like he moved to California at the age of nine.
> That’s a laugh. Language isn’t spread by way of EU diplomats. Regular people are more likely to be “anchored” to American English.
American English is the best variant of English because we stole it. Nobody cares if somebody messes with it because, eh, it isn’t ours anyway. Let’s drive this language like a stolen car.
> this uniform blob of non-Anglos who drive scooters, eat baguettes and go to raves. And speak the same pidgin apparently.
Since the rise of the web, and tv and movies before it, regional language divergence is decreasing instead of increasing as it did in the past. Future English will be more globally unified but with more online text chatting influences.
The difference is that education is now ubiquitous and almost everyone who matters is literate. The reason why Latin diverged into Romance languages is that literacy among the secular class died out, and both the elite and the peasants had no knowledge of formal Latin. (The Church did, but it was relatively weak in Early Middle Ages, certainly not strong enough to push the society to use a certain standard of language.)
Sure, if the educational system today collapses and we revert to pre-industrial state like around 500 AD, English will spontaneously develop into a family of mutually unintelligible languages.
I sincerely hope that this won't happen, though, because 95 per cent of humanity would die. We cannot feed 8 billion people with pre-modern technology.
Romans didn't have TVs, and couldn't still listen to recordings of people talking from a century before.
edit: If we're not killed by corruption, the assumption is that people will be enjoying films made in the 1920's and 30's in the 2220's and the 2230's. That's completely unprecedented, and has to pin a language to a certain extent.
Imagine if during the Great Vowel Shift, everybody could listen (and did listen, for entertainment) to people speaking at length from before. It would have ended up a fashion where maybe a couple of features stuck.
In 2230, there will be 300 years of film to watch. The past will overwhelm the present.
There will be more YouTube and TikTok video generated in a year than the previous 300 - 5 most recent years of film/video. 90%+ of youth video consumption will be contemporaneous to the viewer.
