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A comment on The euro is a disaster even for the countries that do everything right. Parent comment

Re:The euro is a disaster even for the countries that do eve... by filmor on Monday July 20, 2015 @05:18AM (#9914848)
And rightly so, there are far more native German speakers in the EU than native English speakers. Even French is mother tongue to more people than English.
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Re:The euro is a disaster even for the countries that do eve... by adventured on Monday July 20, 2015 @06:35AM (#9915078)
And yet half of all members of the EU don't share a common language they're functional in. That's a drastic inefficiency. The logical means of correcting it, is to standardize on English, which would provide a much greater international benefit than any other language already heavily spoken in the EU.

18% of the EU speaks German natively, versus 13% for English. However roughly 50% speak English as a whole, versus 38% for German. There are 360 million native English speakers in the world, and only 89 million German; with a billion English speakers globally, and only 166 million German speakers.

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Re:The euro is a disaster even for the countries that do eve... by kilburn on Monday July 20, 2015 @06:34AM (#9915075)
More than half the EU population already speaks english whereas less than one third speaks German [1]. Plus it is a much better choice thinking in global (worldwise) terms.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_the_European_Unio...

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Re:The euro is a disaster even for the countries that do eve... by dschiptsov on Monday July 20, 2015 @06:17AM (#9915021)
English is "defacto international (or global) language" you like it or not.

No one said that English must be the only state language of Europe.

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