Fair point. With that said, both are expensive for lean startups without outside investment. Many Dutch startups always look at the Dutch market first, before they fan out to a few European countries and only then do they look at Europe. And if that all succeed, only then do they dare to look at the US and perhaps the world.
This is very true. On the other hand, The Netherlands is a country that easily adopts new tech ideas and products compared to other European countries.
It isn't that cheap if you have to consider different branding and marketing campaigns when you want to expand to neighbor regions. The cost of covering the EU market can increase really fast.
Edit: it's also an ongoing cost, so the earliest you start to support additional locales the more expensive your general product development becomes. Once start to translate your UI you now have to keep it up-to-date all the time. The more translations you have the more expensive that process is when developing new features, both in actual time/energy to be sure that your UI/UX work well in your supported locales, and expenses for translators.
FWIW, you have to adhere to couple dozen sets of laws as well, on top of translation and regionalization, when building EU-wide products. The EU works to harmonize a lot of these laws, but it's still made of sovereign nation-states.
To your first question, definitely not. Like, not at all. Generally speaking countries in northern Europe are very good at English, it's used often in cities and if you live in a major city you can do almost everything in English. I lived in Berlin for 3 years and you can do virtually everything (but administrative stuff) in English (in fact that makes it difficult to learn German by immersion, people switch to English as soon as they notice that you have a foreign accent or speak a bit slowly or with difficulty).
But that's it. Local languages are dominant for any other situation. And while English is the main language used for business, the majority of people don't speak it fluently.
That varies a lot per country, for example Sweden and Norway are really good at teaching English, Austria, Germany and Belgium are ok, France, Spain, and Italy are bad.
Even in Germany. There's the "Berlin bubble" where (as you say) English is common. But go outside that, especially to areas like Bavaria or Saxony on the eastern side, and no-one speaks English at all.
It'll be interesting to see what happens after Brexit. My guess is that English will remain as the common language in Europe. It's too entrenched now. And the Irish still speak it (for now).
Anecdote from my personal experience in daily life, as a German in Germany.
While I can speak English mostly without any special effort, it sometimes surprises me that I need time (up to 2 seconds maybe) to switch, when someone is asking me something. As in at first it doesn't even register as English, more like thinking what was that?. Then, delayed I suddenly understand. Of course it depends on the situation (environment, other sounds, other speakers, and so on, too) and the accent/dialect of the speaker. In other cases no problem at all, like instant switching without any hassle/thinking about it.
I sometimes experience something similar with English (my first language, and I'm monolingual, unless we're being extremely charitable). I'll ask someone to repeat themselves, then momentarily afterwards, what they said suddenly clicks, before they've gone ahead and repeated the message.
I think of it like this: we have an interpretation subsystem to interpret messages carried in sound (in whichever language). It's a soft real-time system. Typically it succeeds in interpreting good inputs, making its deadline, and it decisively rejects invalid inputs (on account of mumbling, overwhelming background noise, etc), also within the deadline. Occasionally it succeeds in interpreting a sound signal but misses its deadline.
There's also a request-repeat subsystem, which may fire any time after the interpretation subsystem has either rejected an input as invalid, or missed a deadline. When it fires, we say something like What was that? to request retransmission of the previous message.
When the interpretation subsystem misses a deadline but then succeeds, it races the request-repeat subsystem, so there's a chance of a What was that? being uttered immediately before successful interpretation of the previous message.
I have the same, but in reverse. I can get the gist of German speech, if I'm expecting it and have some clue about context. If it's out of context, then it just comes across as a mess of sounds. I find it so strange that a sentence made entirely out of words that I know is so incomprehensible out of context.
IMHO the fact that the EU doesn’t have the UK anymore is a very good reason to define it as our main working language. That will of course never happen, but it would make sense to have a language that doesn’t advantage one country member over others given that we all have English as our secondary language.
In fact my personal wish would be the standardization on European English, at the same level as UK English, US English, Indian English, etc. and define it as our common EU language, bound to the pan-EU identity.
> That will of course never happen, but it would make sense to have a language that doesn’t advantage one country member over others given that we all have English as our secondary language.
Don't forget that English is indeed a secondary language in the Republic of Ireland - their first official language is Irish. So what they said still holds true including the Republic of Ireland.
Doesn't European English as a separate dialect have a lot of problems?
The English that Europe uses is so mangled that English speakers can't understand it. It often means the exact opposite of what is intended, sometimes dangerously so (see 'so-called' for example.) This leads to less understanding, rather than more.
I see it as a different flavour of English. Every single flavour of English has its own distinction and incompatibility with the others, that's what defines it as its own thing.
A US or UK English speaker will face issues when talking with a Indian English speaker, or an Australian English speaker.
In practice we already use EU English, both in official documents and communications, and in casual exchanges. We just don't recognize it officially.
The document you share is using UK English as the standard to follow, which explain why there are some differences.
> This leads to less understanding, rather than more.
That leads to a common language WITHIN the EU, which is what we don't have currently. I mean, again, we do have European English, we just don't recognize it, and it isn't as spread as it could be. The differences with other forms of English are small enough to increase the general communication between EU citizens and other English speakers in the world, but as you said also comes with a few differences that can cause misunderstanding. I work in international environments with people from all over the world, we already face those issues and they aren't a big deal.
I think you're being very generous there in painting it as some kind of naturally occurring dialect of a culture.
> The document you share is using UK English as the standard to follow
Incorrect. It refers to and compares against Irish English and US English as well, as people would in fact normally understand it. It's not academic or prescriptive.
> In practice we already use EU English, both in official documents and communications, and in casual exchanges.
You can't convince me people are using contorted jargon like 'financial envelope' in casual exchanges with anyone.
These are the problems in practice:
> the European institutions also need to communicate with the outside world and our documents need to be translated – both
tasks that are not facilitated by the use of terminology that is unknown to native speakers and either does not appear in
dictionaries or is shown in them with a different meaning
It's not just a case of 'not recognising it officially' - nobody understands it and dictionaries (of any dialect) don't help.
What is the point of a dialect that only people writing reports, not reading them (the actual people they're governing), understands?
Ok, I see that you completely misunderstood what I'm talking about. I don't really care if the EU standardize a EU English based on translation mistakes present in official EU documents. For example the case you point to, "financial envelope" seems to be a direct translation from French (at least that's how it feels as a native French speaker). Drop it if you want, it's just a detail.
I'm talking about the way the language is used by European citizens.
No we mean the same thing. The Wikipedia article you posted even links to the report I posted as a reference for what they mean!
That’s an EU report, by the way, criticising EU English as confusing and not understandable by citizens of any country unless they’re EU officials. That’s not a useful shared dialect!
Again, you're talking about the EU officials, that's not something I would consider. You're also pointing to the report as an authority on the domain, but while it is an interesting document to start a discussion it isn't in itself something that dictates what is useful or not.
The reason to standardize European English would be to give the 400+ millions people living in the EU a common, shared language they could identify with. These people already use in their daily life a form of English that doesn't follow US or UK standards. It is obviously understandable by citizens, otherwise they wouldn't be able to use it. They are right now using this weird, bastardized version of English to do business, communicate with friends, with their families, etc. This European English is already a de-facto language used for communication between EU citizens. Instead of telling them to correct their use of the language because it fails to follow British standards, I would like this distinct form of English, as it is practiced, to be recognized.
And if that offenses British English speakers, then that's fine, they will adapt the same way they already do.
