What Does Brexit Mean for the English Language?

Last Thursday, the United Kingdom headed to the polls to decide whether or not the country wanted to remain part of the European Union. In the end, in a very close referendum, 51.9% of voters were in favour of leaving the EU.

There are plenty of ramifications for the UK, politically, economically, etc. However, one thing that is concerning to us at The Lingua File is the fact that English may take a dramatic step down on a political scale. Of course, English is an official language in Ireland, so it will retain its official status within the EU. However, the population of Ireland is around 4.5 million, while the UK is home to around 65 million people. There's no way that this giant loss of native speakers is not going to affect EU policy.

The EU is going to make an example of the UK when negotiations formally begin, since few member states want to make leaving the EU look favourable, for fear of losing more members. In that event, English as an official language will seem fairly insignificant.

I can't imagine that English will be affected on a global scale. The language is the lingua franca in many countries around the world, but within the institutions of the EU, it will lose a huge amount of clout when the UK leaves.

Regardless of what the EU chooses to do about the working languages within the union, the language situation within the UK is worrying. The EU has heavily promoted language learning within the UK, and with the country moving away from Europe politically, it certainly makes me concerned for the already worrying state of language learning within the country. If just over half of the British population has decided they're better off without Europe, they may also think they're better off without their languages.

Is Brexit good or bad for language learning within the UK? Has it changed the English language's status within Europe? Tell us what you think in the comments below.

The CEFR and Standardising Language Learning

If you speak a foreign language and live within the EU, you may be familiar with the Central European Framework of Reference for Languages: Learning, Teaching, Assessment, which is usually referred to as CEFR.

The framework is an initiative that for the last two decades has aimed to establish standardised levels for gauging a language user's proficiency in any given foreign language throughout the EU. The most widely-recognised feature of the CEFR is the letter and number classification given as a reference to language speakers.

The classifications go from A1, which is used to describe those beginning their language-learning journey, to C2, which describes those who have mastered their foreign language. Between those two extremes you have A2, B1, B2, and C1.

The CEFR is certainly useful when it comes to employment as there are a number of exams that language users can take in order to prove to what level they can use their foreign language. On the one hand, this helps employers, who can have these claims verified and backed up by an employee's exam results. On the other hand, it can also open doors for language users looking for work, if they have completed any of the appropriate exams.

It's great that this framework promotes language learning around Europe and encourages many people, especially adult learners, to continue learning foreign languages that they may have studied in school, or even pick up completely new ones.

However, this framework can become an issue when it takes on the form of red tape and bureaucracy. When students consider learning a language to be little more than a means to a certificate and take no joy in it, it makes me incredibly sad. Of course, everybody has their reasons for learning a language, but when you make it a joyless business venture or just something to put on your CV, I think you might be missing a much bigger picture...

I don't think I could ever tell someone not to learn another language, even if I think it's for all the wrong reasons. I just think that if you learn a language only for employability, it's a lot like stargazing during the day.

Europe Day: Celebrating Language in Europe

Beautiful Europe, as seen from Space.

Today we're celebrating "Europe Day", a celebration of peace and unity in Europe. The EU celebrates Europe Day today, on 9 May, as opposed to the Council of Europe, which celebrated it on Monday, 5 May, coinciding with their establishment in 1949.

9 May is celebrated by the EU as it was the day that the Schuman Declaration was proposed in 1950. The aim of the declaration was to propose a supranational community, which led to the formation of the European Coal and Steel Community and eventually the European Union (EU). 

Instead of a history lesson on the EU, let's instead take a look at some of the languages in Europe... this is a language blog, after all. Rather than discuss the main languages, which have all been covered in their respective language profiles, we thought we'd take a look at the "genesis" of language in Europe, travelling right to the roots of Europe's language tree, where we find Indo-European languages.

So the "European" from Indo-European refers to Europe, but what about "Indo"? Indo actually refers to India and if India's included you know this is a big family of languages. However, linguists believe that there is a shared ancestry among the over 400 languages that are considered to be part of this heritage.

Indo-European languages make up the majority of the world's languages, with 45% of the world's population speaking an Indo-European language. In fact, Indo-European languages make up 12 of the top 20 most-spoken languages in the world.

With nearly half of the world speaking an Indo-European language and "European" being in the name, surely every language in Europe belongs to this language family, right? Wrong!

Ignoring languages spoken in Europe due to current immigration trends, such as Chinese, for example, many of the "native" languages of Europe are not Indo-European. We've already seen that Basque is a language isolate with no strong evidence to support its relation to any other language in the world.

While Basque is a well-known exception, there are also the Karvelian languages, which include Georgian and several related languages. There is also not a strong consensus on which family the North Caucasian languages belong to, or whether they are in their own family at all.

There's also the Uralic languages, including Estonian, Finnish, and Hungarian, which all reside in Europe, though this language family is also contested. Turkic and Mongolic languages are also not Indo-European languages, and once you get to the Semitic languages of Cypriot Marionite Arabic and Maltese, spoken in Cyprus and Malta respectively, you begin to get a sense that  Europe is not as linguistically homogeneous as you may think. The final Semitic language, Hebrew, has been spoken by Jewish communities throughout Europe for years, and nicely brings us to the end of the exceptions.

So celebrate Europe with us today! Whether you love or loathe the EU, celebrate the beautiful linguistic diversity of this continent, then be ashamed of it tomorrow as you watch near-monolingual monstrosity that is Eurovision!!!

Why Must Eurovision Be So Monolingual?

Last night, we watched the first of this week's semifinals in the lead up to Saturday's Eurovision Song Contest. Despite our best intentions, we actually enjoyed it. What we didn't enjoy was the way in which a Europe-wide competition of music, for lack of a better description, seemed to lack any kind of linguistic diversity.

As we watched 16 countries vie for a place in the final, it was pointed out to us by the show's commentators that only two of these countries would actually be singing in a language other than English.

Copenhagen, the beautiful host city of this year's Eurovision.

The whole evening was aired live from Copenhagen, Denmark. Watching from the UK, we viewed it on BBC3, which quickly had its own commentators interrupt the three Danish hosts, despite them speaking in English, as if it would have been an atrocity for the British audience to hear near-perfect English from non-native speakers.

Performances in English

As a bit of a flag enthusiast, I did enjoy the country introductions, in which the performers made a version of their own flag out of something. After some pomp and ceremony, the first performance was Armenia's entry, "Not Alone", which as you can guess from the title is in English, rather than Armenian, the official language of the South Caucasus nation.

Though we salivated as Latvia made their flag out of cake, they didn't bother with Latvian. Their English-language song was a quirky number about cake, which I admit would have been lost on me had it not been in English. While I found the Estonian entry fairly forgettable, it would have probably been more memorable had it been in Estonian, or even the regional languages Võro and Setu, just to mess with everybody's heads.

As a big ABBA fan, I can hardly complain about Sweden's entry being in English, but after three songs in English, another language, especially Swedish, would have been nice change for the international competition. On a personal note, I loved Iceland's entry and was delighted when they made it through to the final, though I also think the performance was vibrant enough and the tune was catchy enough to have been in any language, except maybe Klingon...

I thought Albania's entry was so dull that I would have preferred it in Albanian so I could have at least researched the lyrics later, and perhaps even learn a tiny bit of the language whilst I was at it.

The Russian entry, complete with blonde twins on a see-saw, was bound to cause some controversy. Even though it wasn't in Russian or any of its 27 regional languages, it was still quite sad to see the Copenhagen crowd boo the performers. The 2012 hosts, Azerbaijan, didn't bother to promote their own language either, with their entry "Start a Fire", which made it through to the finals on Saturday.

The Ukranian entry, despite having a guy run in an over-sized hamster wheel, progressed through to the final. The song entitled "Tick-Tock" is English onomatopoeia rather than Ukranian or any of the 18 regional languages of the country, though as onomatopoeia, it is probably the most universal of the English-language semifinalists from Tuesday night.

Belgium, despite its three official languages, still picked a song in English. This is especially odd as two of Belgium's official languages, French, and German, are considered to be two of the most important languages in Europe, whilst the other official language, Dutch, is a personal favourite of mine.

Moldova's "Wild Soul" wasn't enough to get them to the final, and by this point I was pretty sick of English-language songs and would have happily welcomed a song in either Romanian, Ukranian, Russian, or even the Gagauz language, a Turkic language spoken by the Gagauz people native to parts of both Ukraine and Moldova.

While the Principality of San Marino didn't sing in Italian, they made it through to the final and their entry, "Maybe (Forse)", was performed in English, though an Italian version was also recorded.

As I have a soft spot for the Dutch language, it was a shame to hear that their entry was also in English. The Hungarian entry was sung by András-Kállay Saunders, a Hungarian American, though from the language choice and accent, you can tell he doesn't speak English as a second language, though he probably could sing in Hungarian.

In Their Own Language

The only two entrants to bother with their own languages were Portugal and Montenegro, who were both drawn to perform late in the running order. While the Portuguese entry "Quero Ser Tua" failed to make the final, the Montenegrin entry "Мој свијет", which was rendered using the Latin alphabet as "Moj svijet", made it to the final, making it the only finalist from the first semifinal to not be in the English language.

Did you watch the first semifinal? Will you be watching the second? Which of the acts were your favourite and would you prefer they sing in their own languages? Tell us in the comments below.

Debunking Language Stereotypes: French

Having unravelled the nonsense behind stereotypes in the English language, we now direct our attention to other languages across Europe. Having so many cultures and languages in such close proximity always leads to stereotypes, and occasionally even tension. Europe does have a rich history in conflict, after all.

We've done "E" (referring to English, not the drug) in EFIGS, so we thought it would make sense to continue with the next letter in the series, "F".

We thought we'd be understated for once
and just show some French baguettes
instead of a mustachioed man in a beret and
striped shirt holding them whilst smoking.

We all know the stereotypes when it comes to the French people. What interests us are the stereotypes connected to the French language. In our experience, the most noticeable and the most frequently impersonated is "ze" as a replacement for "the". This is a common stereotype and, unfortunately for native French speakers, bears true. French does not have the phonemes /θ/ or /ð/, which represent the sound of the letters "th" in words such as mathematics and weather respectively. As a result, French speakers tend to approximate the sound with the phoneme /z/, which in English is used for the letter "z" in words such as zoo.

The French language also does not feature the phoneme /r/ which in is used for the letter "r" in American English. Due to the non-rhotic nature of many accents in British English, it isn't always used for "r" in the UK. The French use the phoneme /ʁ/ for the letter "r" and as a result are unfamiliar with the letter's English pronunciation.

It should also be noted that the use of the definite article (le, la, les) in French is far more common than use of the is in English. As a result, French speakers may occasionally unnecessarily add the to sentences, in the same way that native English speakers will tend to omit the definite article when they speak French. Nobody's perfect, after all.

Top Language Universities: Europe

Since we've already looked at the best language universities in the US, the UK, Canada and Australia, we're now turning our eye to Europe as a whole. You don't need to study languages from within an English-speaking country... in fact, you may be better off elsewhere! We've got the best options from Europe, and if you're an EU citizen, consider these options without a visa requirement.

A graduation at Leiden University, circa 1650.

Leiden University, Netherlands

Obviously, the courses at Leiden University are in Dutch, so make sure you brush up. Leiden University is the only Dutch institution that makes our list so if you're in the Netherlands, make sure this is the place you're going.

Georg-August-Universität Göttingen, Germany

The first German entrant on our list offers a vast range of languages and linguistics courses for all you linguaphiles out there. Arabic, English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese and Latin are some of the many languages offered.

École Normale Supérieure, Paris, France

The first of two French universities to feature, the École Normale Supérieure (ENS) in Paris has an outstanding reputation and is in Paris, after all. If you need a reason to move to one the world's greatest cities (though some Parisians like to say otherwise), the ENS may be the right choice.

Aarhus University, Denmark

Throughout the years, Denmark has been no stranger to intellectual superiority. It is the birthplace of Lego after all. Though not in Billund, Lego's hometown, Aarhus University, unsurprisingly in Aarhus, would be a fantastic place to study languages. It should be noted that the cost of living in Denmark is rather high but most universities on this list are in cities where the cost of living can hardly be considered cheap.

University of Vienna, Austria

It's very difficult to say anything bad about Vienna, and it's even more difficult to say anything bad about the quality of the language education provided by the University of Vienna. It's also the oldest university in the German-speaking world.

Piazza Maggiore, Bologna

University of Bologna, Italy

The only Italian university on our list. If Denmark, Germany, Austria and France are too cold for you, perhaps a better climate and a highly-rated Italian university may be the one for you. It's the oldest continuous university in the world, so you can expect the quality that comes from nearly 1,000 years of educating. You can study languages including Finnish, Japanese, Dutch, and Polish.

Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, Germany

The courses at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München (LMU) are taught in German, so make sure you have a good grasp of the language. The language faculty is the biggest of any of the faculties at LMU and a good range of linguistic courses are on offer.

Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Germany

Aside from being a great place to be, Berlin boasts two of Europe's best language-learning institutions. The first, the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, is just over 200 years old. That's fairly young given the heritage of some of the others universities in this list. That said, these whipper-snappers sure can teach languages!

Freie Universität Berlin, Germany

Berlin's other great university offers programmes for English, French, German, Greek, Latin, Italian and Spanish. It's also the largest research university in Berlin and even younger than the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, but don't let that put you off. It ranks higher than its older brother in this list.

The buildings at Paris IV are pretty nice, too.

Université Paris Sorbonne, Paris IV, France

Though heavily populated by German institutions, it's the French who have the last laugh when it comes to having the best university for languages. As one of the oldest universities in the world, dating back to the 13th century, Paris IV has had plenty of years to hone their trade, especially when it comes to language education.

If you're looking to study languages in Europe but you think you'd get sick of Oxbridge students, Paris IV is the place to be.

Have you attended any of the universities on our list? Are there any that you think should have been included? Tell us in the comments below.

Endonyms And Exonyms: When In Roma

Did you spend your summer in Rome or Roma? Paris or Paree? Why are there different names for places? You wouldn't translate your own name... unless you're a pretentious arse, of course!

This is the Piazza Venezia in Roma. Or is it Venice Square in Rome?

In linguistics we have endonyms and exonyms. If you recall high school chemistry you may remember endothermic and exothermic. Endo being inner and exo being outer. If not, you've just learnt something!

So an endonym is an "inner name" (the -onym being "name" or "word"... the second o is omitted for simplicity), it's what the locals call a place. An exonym is the opposite, the "outer name", as it is known to foreigners, outsiders or in different languages. A simple example is England. In England it's called England, obviously, but in France it's called Angleterre. Countries generally have several exonyms.

This is England when it really was Angleterre...
land of the Angles.

If your hometown has an exonym, you should consider yourself lucky. It suggests that the place was important enough for foreign people to talk about it and create their own word for it. French to English examples of exonyms include: Londres (London), Edimbourg (Edinburgh).

We have exonyms in English for Rome (Roma), Seville (Sevilla) and Munich (München) as well as many, many others.

Proximity appears to help create exonyms. French has a lot of exonyms for places in Spain. Barcelone (Barcelona) is in Catalogne (Catalonia, which is Catalunya in Catalan and Cataluña in Spanish). Lisboa is Lisbon in English. Due to pronunciation differences, many French places are spelt differently in Spanish. Whereas Tolosa for Toulouse comes from the original endonym in Occitan.

Endonyms and exonyms are not necessarily restricted to languages. Monolingual examples include Blighty as an endonym for England. It's not commonly used by Americans, Australians, Canadians, South Africans or pretty much anyone else who speaks English.

Our personal favourite, the Toon, is a nickname commonly used by residents of Newcastle-Upon-Tyne (also known as Geordies) for both their hometown and football team. Although technically a nickname, it's used so frequently as the proper noun by the locals that it could and should be considered an endonym.

Some exonyms are similar to their corresponding endonyms, due to a simple case of being misheard or butchered. Sometimes they are translations of the meaning of the word, such as United Kingdom being Royaume Uni in French, and sometimes, in the unfortunate case of Germany, they're seemingly unrelated.

We're not going back to calling it perfume!

Germany (Deutschland in German) only really has similarities in Dutch and a few other Germanic languages. Across the Romance languages, however, it's known as Allemagne in French, Alemania in Spanish, Germania in Italian and Alemanha in Portuguese. At least Germans can take solace in the fact that they've probably been called far worse!
 

September 26 - European Day of Languages

We like obscure holidays at The Lingua File, and there are few more important to us than the European Day of Languages. In an ideal world every day would be a day of languages... or a Saturday, but sadly, this is not the case.

The purpose of this holiday is to promote the linguistic diversity of Europe and to encourage people to recognize and learn new languages. We think that's a great idea. Politicians got something right!

Despite the linguistic and cultural diversity of Europe, the continent itself is home to only 3% of the world's languages. That definitely takes it out of the running to be the most multilingual continent. However, we can say that Europe does well in terms of cultural diversity. In comparison with North America, the cultural diversity of Europe is pretty astonishing.

This is the linguistic diversity of Europe. It's definitely better than that of Antarctica...

In North America, it's fairly uncommon to get on a train in one place and end up in a different country, let alone somewhere they speak a different language. However, in Europe you can hop on a train in Portugal in the morning, travel through Spain, and end your travels in France (assuming that the Spanish train system hasn't let you down) all in one very long day! Just in that one day, you would have had the opportunity to speak Portuguese, Spanish, Catalan, and French. If you continued your journey through Europe, this linguistic diversity would go on and on and on.

There's much more to European languages than just EFIGS (English, French, Italian, German and Spanish). Europe is home to a multitude of languages (over 200!), many of which you've probably never heard of. So enjoy your European Day of Languages, and take some time to investigate the linguistic diversity that Europe offers as a continent. Make sure you use it as an excuse to eat some good food and drink some fantastic booze too!

Cheers! Živjeli! Kippis! На здравје! Saúde! Iechyd da! 

That's just a small sample of European languages... English, Bosnian, Finnish, Macedonian, Portuguese and Welsh!