Linked by Thom Holwerda on Fri 2nd May 2008 20:52 UTC, submitted by irbis
One of the biggest problems facing the European Union today is the fact that within its borders, 23 languages are spoken. This means that all the important documents have to be translated by a whole army of translators, which costs the taxpayer more than 1 billion Euros a year - and companies trading within the EU spend millions more. The EU-funded TC-STAR project aims to tackle this issue with technology: a system that eats speech in one language, and outputs that same speech in another.
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Member since:
2008-05-03
What you say is far from true, according to EU sources quoted on wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_the_European_Union
13% of the EU population can speak English as a mother tongue. This exceed french, on 12%, but lags German, on 18%.
38% of the EU population can speak english as a second language, a figure that complete dwarves French (14%) and German (14%).
In total, a mighty 51% of the EU's population can speak english, which crushes French on a paltry 26% ad German on 32%.
So perhaps you should do some research before opining on what the most widely spoken languages of the EU are. English has twice the speakers of French and German and so is by far the least elitist. To make the official language either French of German would be pandering to an elite minority of bureaucrats. To make english the official language would be the popular democratic thing to do.
But don't let that stop you spinning lies and pretending it is still 1812 and french the language of culture, business, and statecraft.