Europe Battles English Invasion
English has invaded other national languages.
Trends in business and demographics is like global warming, often there is little that can be done to reverse these trends. So is the case with the English language. “English has already invaded the languages of Moliere, Cervantes and Goethe, dominating the fields of technology and business and even taking some native tongues hostage.But purists are fighting back as hybrids such as “surfen” and “downloaden” on the Internet, “emailear” and style terms “looke” or “gestyled” show the creeping advance of English.Spanglish, Franglais or even Denglish, a mix of Deutsch (German) and English, are prompting a backlash, with a call to arms in some European countries for protective measures or new policies.”
English the new world language
I do not think there can be anything we can do about such trends, its really not that English is taking over, rather I think eventually the world will speak one language, with other languages existing but most people speaking one for business and one at home, that language could be English or Spanish or Chinese, we do not know. Look at the USA, the same argument is being made but the language that is invading, for good or bad, is Spanish.
Tags: Chinese, english, Europe, invasion, Langauge, learn, Spanish, tends
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August 15, 2007at 9:05 am
“rather I think eventually the world will speak one language, with other languages existing but most people speaking one for business and one at home”
I’m not sure I agree with that. Historically, Latin and French have been world languages, as has Greek, Arabic… even more so than English today. But people stubbornly retained their native languages even back during a period when dialects were quite fragmented.
And today, we have another advantage for multi-lingualism– drastically improving computer automatic-translation programs, which greatly reduce the cost of having and using multiple languages. Important languages will fluctuate. The English language is already slipping somewhat as the USA slips from our #1 economic status (China taking our place), as we get saddled with debt, as we get defeated in Iraq like this– we’re no longer necessarily “the indispensable country,” not by a longshot.
Also, I’m not sure I’d worry about terms like “surfen” and “downloaden,” these are just loanwords that all languages pick up from time to time. English, for example, is a German language (Germanic language) that’s in the same family as modern German, but it’s absorbed so much French and Latin loanwords that most of it is Latin/Greek-based– and English is still picking up loanwords from e.g. French, German and Japanese.
German, also, is full of loanwords from French and Latin– in fact, the amount of English in German is a tiny, tiny fraction of the French words in German. And even then, most of the “Denglisch” type English words in German are temporary– they stay in German for a few years, then fall away as native words (or sometimes other loanwords) replace them. For example, “downloaden” is hardly ever used anymore– it’s been replaced by “herunterladen,” a native equivalent, which sounds much more professional and is generally accepted. (You can see this, e.g., in Wikipedia and other professional or semi-prof publications– German has almost no English loanwords in use.)
September 3, 2007at 10:25 pm
In my opinion loans can’t be considered as a tendency to give up your native language. When a language adapts a loan to its own grammar -ie To format (Eng), Formatear (Sp)- we can’t say it is a foreign word but a new own word.
So, I would say that “loan” is not a quite correct word, as once taken no one will ever return it!
February 1, 2008at 8:14 pm
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No they didn’t retain their own languages. The pre-Latin languages of Europe were swept away. No one now speaks Punic or Gallic. French, Spanish and Italian are all Latin languages.
And the scale we’re dealing with now is GLOBAL. There’ll be no external influence from an outside language once English or whatever takes over.