While English is still the de facto lingua franca, with the US burning bridges to Europe like there’s no tomorrow, and the UK having left the EU, should they adopt an easy-to-learn auxillary language?
I’m thinking of an language like Esperanto, but not necessarily that. I was intrigued by Esperanto and went through the course on lernu.net and found it easy to pick up (though I am by no means fluent yet). While it is constructed, it was developed without any modern linguistic knowledge, so another option could be to construct a new language for this purpose, or adopt another already developed language that would serve the purpose better (I don’t have an overview of what is out there).
I know there are several official languages already, but I imagine that leads to a lot of overhead. An auxillary language could make communication easier, and make it easier for citizens of any member state to participate in the Union, and would to some extent remove any power asymmetry resulting from native mastery of a language.
Good idea? Poor idea? Why? Why not?
It just seems like your solution is so much worse then the actual problem.
Every country would have to teach this new language in school for a couple of generations until it would be usable for society and we’d still have to teach english alongside it to keep the current system running. So now native english speaker have to learn a 2nd language, while everyone else has to learn two 2nd languages, the new on and english.
And then it would still be everyone’s 2nd language. Most people suck at their 2nd language so it’s not like it would be used anywhere where English isn’t currently used. You’d still have professional translators between native languages for officals and politicans and such.
And what “disadvantage” are you fixing? Sure, it’s a bit harder to learn English if your Polish instead of Dutch. But it’s something high-school kids can easily overcome. It shouldn’t matter at all once you reach higher education.
Infact, In case of native English speakers not having to learn any 2nd language at all, I’d suggest that is actually a disadvantage. Learning a 2nd language when young helps your brain think and learn in new ways.