English here, there and everywhere

Barry James, Excerpts from an International Herald Tribune article 5 August 1999

The European Central Bank based in Frankfurt, works only in English.

In Brussels, they speak and write an English subgroup that might be called Commissionese, liberally laced with French words like fonctionnaire for bureaucrat, cabinet for private office and stagiaire for intern.

English was introduced as a working language in the pressroom of the European Commission only a few years ago, but now more questions are asked in it than in any other language. The EU executive body no longer bothers to translate all documents from English to other languages.

Finland, which holds the presidency of the European Union, annoyed Germany by deciding that meetings should be held in English and French, but not German, the most widely spoken first language in Western Europe. Germany is boycotting meetings in protest.

Even in France, where resistance to a so-called invasion of Anglo-Saxon culture is at its sharpest, French is undergoing an 'insidious dispossession' because of the increasing use of English in the workplace, according to Jean Dutourd, a member of the Academie Francaise.

With so many companies either taking over subsidiaries in the United States, or themselves being taken over, the swing to English seems unstoppable.

Because of their relatively small domestic markets, European companies have to adopt English to compete globally. In France, the electronics giant Alcatel calls itself 'the hi-speed company.'

At Gemplus, the smart card developer, the president Marc Lassus insists not only on English, but also on Silicon Valley jargon.

"English is our lingua franca," said Markus Peyer of Bertelsmann AG, the German communications giant, which owns American publisher Random House. "It is absolutely necessary, spoken and written. Germans take a pride in their language, but you need another to get along in the world."

In France, the Economics Ministry has held meetings in English. Scientific congresses are routinely held only in English, although the law says a French translation should be provided. French business schools teach in English. Even the editor-in-chief of the French news agency, Agence France-Presse, Eric Wishart, is British.

In Paris, there are more signs in English today than there were in German during the Nazi occupation during the 1940s, says Le Droit de Comprendre - the Right to Understand - a group that campaigns for the defense of French.

What passes for English in many corporations is enough to make a purist wince. "Three hundred buzzwords and no verbs" is how one English teacher, Margaret Burgess, described it. Corporate English, said Michael Plumbe, chairman of the Queen's English Society, tends to be a "subset of simple, fractured language" with no nuance or precision.

Mrs. Burgess said a culture was emerging where it is considered "better to write in bad English than in good French. It is a new criterion, a new way of weeding people out."

To the annoyance of language purists, the French minister of education and research, Claude Allegre, once described English as a useful working tool, like the personal computer or the Internet, and said it should not be considered foreign in France.