English as a lingua franca for Europe: Encyclopedia II - English as a lingua franca for Europe - Current problems with English

English as a lingua franca for Europe - Current problems with English

English as a lingua franca for Europe - Cultural difficulties

Although many native English speakers would rarely consider common speech to be offensive, at times, it would not be suited for an international lingua franca, which should be as culturally neutral as possible.

One of the goals of ELFE would be to remove phrases with inappropriate or culture-specific associations (for example, sports terminology). While this is derided by some as political correctness, proponents of ELFE argue that this is necessary for a lingua franca, because otherwise Europeans who adopt the English language as a means of everyday communication would also be forced into adopting the customs, traditions, and modes of thought specific to the major English-speaking countries, many of which are embodied in the language.

English as a lingua franca for Europe - Pronunciation difficulties

The sounds indicated by the letters th, voiced interdental fricative and voiceless interdental fricative, are not found in other European languages with the exception of Spanish, Greek and Icelandic. The French replace it with the sounds 's' and 'z'; Scandinavians and Italians replace it with the sounds 't' (or 'f') and 'd'. ELFE would choose one of these sounds and standardise it.

In most of the other Germanic languages, like German and Dutch, consonants at the ends of words are never voiced, and so native speakers of those languages tend not to voice consonants at the ends of words in English, hence mug and muck, and bat and bad are pronounced alike to them. There is also confusion because they pronounce the present tense of build the same way as the past tense, built. This confusion also extends to their writing.

Phoneticists note that besides the difference in vowel quality, there is also a difference in length between the vowel sounds in the words bit and beat. Speakers of languages that don't have vowel pairs with this distinction, such as Italian and Spanish, often have difficulty with this distinction. The most obvious difficulty is the large number of vowel sounds in the English language, each one of which has to be learned by listening and training tongue placement.

English as a lingua franca for Europe - Intonation difficulties

English is a language with stressed syllables, like other languages of Europe, both unmarked in writing and capable of changing the meaning of words and even sentences. However the manner of marking different types of information structure (relating to topic, comment, focus and presupposition) and when this is done differ between different langauges. Although words without the usual stress can be understood by native speakers, changes in meaning of sentences spoken by them ("I thought she was supposed to wash the pan" vs. "I thought she was supposed to wash the pan" vs. "I thought she was supposed to wash the pan" vs. "I thought she was supposed to wash the pan.) are often entirely missed.

English as a lingua franca for Europe - Punctuation differences

The British use their punctuation rather similarly to the French, but not entirely. Although people can learn another language fluently, they often slip back to the punctuation of their native one. For example, Germans often do not convert their decimal points from a comma (which is the standard notation for decimal points in Europe) to a full stop (standard in English-speaking countries) when writing in English; nor do they use the comma as a separator for groups of three digits when writing out long numbers. Similarly, some well-established formats used for telephone numbers might vary from mainstream British usage, e.g. the two-digit grouping now used in France.

English as a lingua franca for Europe - Vocabulary difficulties

Non-English speakers, especially the Japanese, sometimes take English words and modify them for concepts that they think are appropriate, but which will not be comprehended by native speakers. There are also many false friends in English, such as the French and German words actuel (aktuell) and eventuel (eventuell), which in English don't mean actual and eventual but rather current and possible.

It is expected that a standardised ELFE would declare many of these neologisms normative, forcing native speakers to use them when communicating with other Europeans.

English as a lingua franca for Europe - Spelling difficulties

English is known to have one of the most difficult spelling systems among European languages, and mistakes among its native speakers are quite common: there is a reasonably high proportion of dyslexic people who speak English as a native language compared to those who speak languages with a more regular orthography. Conversion of written text (most often what a foreign learner meets first) into spoken words is equally difficult and challenging.

The British spell many words as the French do; Americans instead spell a few words as the Germans do. But the French and Germans spell many similar words differently and will use these in their writing. (See also the recent experiences with German spelling reform).

An article published in The Guardian in 2001[1], regarding the use of the English language around the world, noted:

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Current problems with English", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki