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I’ve read about Euro-English and discussed it back on reddit quite some time ago, and I have to say I’m very skeptical whether such a thing exists or ever could exist. Fundamentally it’s a mis-learned standard English, and the mis-learning is to a large degree determined by the speaker’s native language - which varies extremely across Europe. Slavic speakers will have issues with articles, Germans much less so, etc. Consequently there’s hardly any definite characteristic of Euro-English (the examples in the article are too vaguely described, and I’m sure many European ESLs would find them grammatically unacceptable too). Perhaps one could speak of a variety of English used by EU politicians and institutions, but those people are hardly a linguistic model for the vast majority of other speakers.
Define standard English?
Both the USA and UK don’t agree on what it is.
You’d think it’s the language spoken in England
The sort of English you’ll see in literature, newspapers, any remotely formal communication, in grammars (which learning materials are based on as well). The stuff learners will aim to learn.
Differences between US and UK English, and the dialectal variety within each of them, are not all that relevant here. Where I live, students are taught British English, but no professor ever chastised us for using American pronunciation or vocabulary. Both are within the range of what natives will find acceptable.
I wouldn’t ever drop the s for he/she/it but the rest is perfectly cromulent. Remember these aren’t high school mistakes they’re stuff that C2 speakers use, practically native-level “mistakes”, just as you’ll see American generals writing reports using “less” instead of “fewer”, or “good” instead of “well”, or “who” instead of “whom” (shudder). “was” instead of “were”. That’s language evolution, plain and simple, things change as they always have and the language does different things in different places.
“Competences”, “planification”, “to hop over” (=to refrain from)? Sorry, that stuff is downright grotesque.
I can’t remember that because the WP article didn’t claim that. In fact, if you make these mistakes, you’re not C2, by definition.
Except that this is language change from within the native community, in their native language, aimed from native speakers at other natives who will understand or (if they don’t understand them or use a different variety) correct them. Some of that stuff (who-whom, was-were) is well-established in already existing usage and dialects, it’s not an innovation at all.
I’ll repeat myself: no, this isn’t ordinary language change, as this “Euro English” is simply a local characteristic of this or that speaker who failed to learn English as it is used by native speakers. ‘Euro English’ is not a real unit, as it has no defining characteristics. Imagine a European using some calque from his native language while talking to a European who has a different native language and who can’t understand the calque - this is not what happens in a normal speech community, these people will fail to understand each other, and their English is not a stable or reliably identifiable linguistic variety. You can see that especially in the table with “Euro English vocabulary”, where words are clearly marked by their origin, and they won’t be understood or will be found absurd by many other Europeans.
So, I have heard, is Indians using “doing the needful”. Native English speakers using that phrase, mind you. People also get their underwear in a twist over “aks” which, as a variant, goes back to at least Old English. It may go back further but we don’t have written evidence for Proto-West-Germanic so it’s impossible to tell.
To call the one evolution and the other mistake you need to do better than “one group learned the language at an earlier age”, as a linguist making that claim you’d have to demonstrate that both sets of changes follow fundamentally different laws, or one side follows laws, the other doesn’t.
And, FWIW, I have lost count how often people assumed I’m a native English speaker. Even Brits managed to pin my accent to their east coast, which isn’t terribly wrong but still on the wrong side of the North Sea. And I didn’t even start to learn the language that early, only starting at age 10 or so nowadays kids are starting at 6.
Oh. That’s a nice one. Find me a European language where “flea market” doesn’t translate properly. Also Euro English doesn’t always use calques, e.g. Spitzenkandidat didn’t get turned into point candidate but even if it did it’d be perfectly cromulent as it matches English “to take point”. The translation “lead candidate”, I think, comes from Anglophones. It’s not terribly precise, semantically speaking. They’re not leaders as-such, they’re spear tips thrust by their party.
European languages have been in intense contact with each other for time immemorial there’s plenty of common structure underneath the differences, even among those that aren’t descendants of PIE. Flea market, for example, works in Hungarian and Finnish. As said: Find me a language where it isn’t understood.
English elsewhere is losing “whom” because monolingual native speakers by and large seem to be incapable of understanding the difference even if you point out to them that they’re using “he” vs. “him” all the time. If your native language is a romance one you might be in a similar boat, if it’s Slavic or Germanic, most of which retain a lot more case structure than English, it’s dead obvious and not using “whom” sounds plain wrong. The evolutionary inertia thus has a different direction, doesn’t mean that it’s not following proper evolutionary laws, that it’s a mistake to bat an eye on the overuse of “who”.
You’re mixing up different topics here. Indians are native speakers, if I’m not mistaken, they’ve learned that phrase from other Indian English speakers and they use it among themselves with no problem. Same as “aks”. These are definitely legitimate varieties, acceptable within those communities, regardless of what outsiders may say.
Where is the community of speakers that finds all these “Euro English” forms acceptable? I’m evidently not a part of that community, because I don’t talk as that article describes.
Well that’s very much the point, exactly, Euro English doesn’t follow any laws in particular. To reduce the problem to the age of learning is bordering on deliberate misunderstanding. Native English speakers learn to not use “whom” from their parents and their surroundings, they get by without using it, and the linguistic phenomenon is self-sustaining. Non-natives in Europe learn English from their teachers, who (should) have a close-to-native grasp of language, and from native speaker content that they’re exposed to regularly (especially the younger generations, who can spend hours communicating with natives directly through voice chat). Deviations from the models (teachers and natives) are not created through communication with other European non-natives. With the people from your own country, you speak in your native language, and you use English for the rest of the world, regardless of whether the speaker on the other end is European, Asian, African, or anything else, and their influence won’t be systematic. Deviations from the native model are always a result of the native language (again, we’re talking about dozens of native languages, resulting in completely unrelated sorts of deviations), and they are not nearly as hard-coded as the native language; the speaker, if made aware of his mistakes, will try to correct them, at least when it comes to grammar (pronunciation being especially difficult to master).
I would definitely expect a linguist describing a language variety to, to express it more visually, draw a Venn diagram with the characteristics of that variety that the speakers use, and to figure out some common ground, some defining and typical characteristics. If there is no common ground, and I firmly believe there none for the supposed Euro English, then we might at best talk about multipe varieties, and not one single meaningful unit. Like, do you and me count as speakers of Euro English? Do Russians and French count, including those I’ve heard speaking English so bad I had to ask them to switch to their native language so I could understand them? Does my sister count, who chats with Americans, Europeans and Asians on the regular through Discord? Do the European politicians, with their awkward pronunciation and annoying jargon? These are some very different Englishes, with nothing in common with regards to pronunciation, and, I believe, also nothing with regards to grammar. The WP explicitly narrows it down to “EU staff, expatriates and migrants from EU countries, young international travellers (such as exchange students in the EU’s Erasmus programme) and European diplomats with a lower proficiency in the language”, which is somewhat acceptable, maybe, except I doubt these groups have actually been studied systematically and compared within themselves and against other Europeans’ Englishes.
This is the crux of the issue, basically. To speak of something, you need a definition of it. There’s no differentia specifica here, these people do not seem to form a community, and their language has no distinct characteristics or rules (stuff that tells you “me likes to eating cake” is not proper English - to describe a linguistic variety/dialect/language, it is necessary to be able to describe correct and incorrect sentences in it).
You mean as a calque? Without digging around much: my native Croatian (buvljak), and Russian (baraholka). In Croatian the word actually is etymologically related to the word for ‘flea’, but I didn’t even notice that it’s connected until you asked this, as it underwent a sound change that’s rare in Croatian (buha > buva). It also lacks the “market” element. The calque would sound very different and would be incomprehensible. The Russian word can be etymologically explained as “the place for selling old/worthless objects”.
An occasional term that’s been translated across several languages is hardly an element of common structure. The languages are varied enough not to be conductive to creating a remotely uniform Euro English.
My native language is Slavic and I absolutely do not find the who-whom>who-who an issue, as I learned English from native speaker material (texts, mainly) and decent enough teachers who themselves follow native speakers, rather than applying the Slavic case structure to English. Perhaps I’m more inclined to using ‘whom’ than the average native, but even then I don’t use it systematically (maybe I barely use it at all, really, it’s hard to tell).
In Europe. English is the Lingua Franca, if you have a Danish plumber talking to a French electrician on an Italian building site it’s going to be in English. The examples though are mostly from Brussels, which also explains why there’s so many administrative terms in there.
And, true, English is an international Lingua Franca. We have a lot more contact with other Europeans than with, say, Japanese, though, and also way more shared history with it.
Have you tried to address that doubt by doing a literature review, there’s studies going back to at least 2000. Also that’s not how you use the plural of English, or do you mean that each of them speak multiple varieties? Going out on a limb, the Slavic languages are quite steadfast indeed when it comes to number agreement across cases. Are you speaking Slavo-English? If another linguistic group doesn’t mind that kind of construction and adopts it, might that constitute Euro-English?
As you can notice, this is not in line with the definition found on Wikipedia. Also, an Italian building site is linguistically clearly not relevant.
Would the community and the variety of English it uses would be any different if instead of a French electrician you had a Turkish or Nepalese one? Because that’s a way more likely situation.
Well, I’ve just read one of the articles used as a reference on WP. It’s based on a survey among 65 Erasmus students (not a very wide sample, as the study itself admits), and doesn’t sound terribly convinced: https://hrcak.srce.hr/en/clanak/135148 - finding only a few characteristics to be markers of potential “Euro-English” (and, interestingly enough, noting that some of them appear to be arising or at least acceptable in native English too). If you have read something more convincing and systematic than the WP article, feel free to forward it to me.
Um, have you done a literature review? Yes, that’s what “Englishes” is supposed to mean, roughly speaking, it’s a commonplace term at this point and it’s odd you haven’t heard of it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Englishes
I’m not sure what that has to do with the topic at hand. There are next to no cases here, we’re talking in English.
Do I sound like I speak it? Are there any “Slavo-English” characteristics to my writing that you notice? Pluralising a language name is an odd thing in Slavic languages too (and especially difficult in my native language, due to the same case-number suffix in Nom.sg and Nom.pl), if that’s what you’re aiming for. I used it because it’s already used in English by native speakers.
You do know you’re not supposed to just slap an [area/language family] prefixoid onto “English” and call it a day? There is no Slavo-English just because you call it that way, Slavic languages do have similarities that result in similarly mis-learned English, but that doesn’t make them all a distinct variety of English, and there remains a number of curious dissimilarities among them (as I’ve noticed while talking with other native Slavic speakers in English).
(Assuming we’re talking about the dubiously grammatical “Englishes” here, which you ascribe to Slavic influence - which is incorrect but I’ll ignore that for the sake of the argument.) Probably, though there would probably have to be more than one single grammatical phenomenon that gets widely adopted if you want to speak of a full-blown linguistic variety. But it’s all pointless to discuss. In practice, it definitely wouldn’t go down as you describe. The linguistic group that adopts the construction should be all or most of Europe, going by the name. And that’s not very likely to happen, because many speakers would barely be exposed to it at all (do you really think many Frenchmen and Germans hear Slavs speaking English?), and if they heard it they’d immediately notice the form is odd, not in line either with English as they were taught, as they might be inclined to speak due to their native language, or in line with what they hear of English in general, and thus they would reject it. It’s a bit like the “would you still love me if I were a worm” sort of question.
Oh I’m not doubting the existence of the term “Englishes”, it’s just that I’m quite sure I only speak one of them. I can do CS technobabble and go for a more academic register, I can be colloquial, but overall it’s still the same, broad, variety. I can also do the same in German and it’s all Northern Standard German (Missingsch).
This is about a many-one vs. many-many relationship. Compare “Looking at other players’ head” vs. “Looking at other players’ hands”: Both times we’re talking about multiple heads and multiple hands, but in the first case you have a head per person, in the second you have multiple hands per person. If it was “other players’ hand” you’re probably talking about a game of cards. Though TBH this is quite awkward because idiomatically it’s “looking at the head of other players”, how dare you use an actual genitive.
Be the reason why you used the plural as it may, it’s exactly these kinds of semantic details and edge cases where language evolves easily because you can say either “hand” or “hands” and be understood because people have the context that you’re talking about poker or gloves, context which takes precedence over your choice of plural. Within your poker or knitting club, as the case may be, a standard will emerge and you have a little, baby, micro-variety of English. If it matches up with what other clubs are producing then the variety grows and stabilises.
Not at all linguists are convinced that Euro-English can be classed as a variety, true, but that’s mostly because there’s no proper definition of a language variety when used as a Lingua Franca, all the definitions linguists have assume native usage. Pretty much all of the discussion is about “do we want to define this such or not”, not “are there things which can be identified as typically Euro-English”. It’s an identifiable thing, what linguists are arguing about is whether it’s a variety.
And, again, I have to emphasise language proficiency of many speakers who use these identifiable forms: C-level speakers have access to poetic registers, language at its most “anarchy is order” stage. To class much of what they do as “mistake” is akin to classing Yoda speak as “broken English”: Very much not it is, poetic register it uses, many a renowned writer using the construction you can witness. A non-native speaker preferring that construction is not a mistake, it’s an idiomatic preference (Yoda doesn’t always use OSV, btw).
That’s not terribly uncommon. Drastic example: Drop a native English speaker into Germany and within a couple of months they’re going to catch themselves saying “handy” instead of “mobile” when speaking English… and then fight it tooth and nail. But “beamer” for “projector” will fly straight past their language integrity sensors, presumably due to lack of sexual implication. Humans are funny like that.
Immersion aside languages, especially related languages, can have common evolutionary directions. E.g. Low Saxon and English both lost the ge- prefix in past participles and simplified case structure the exact same way after splitting into different languages. Low Saxon lags behind when it comes to getting rid of noun classes but the evolutionary direction is definitely there1. A change affecting all English varieties could conceptually very well start in Euro-English as one of the erm “source” languages of Euro-English could be further ahead in a shared evolutionary direction, accelerating the process of the change happening in Euro-English, and then finally the other varieties saying “oh, that’s neat, why didn’t I think of that”.
1 Low Saxon would use “Looking at the players their hands”, btw, both for a many-one and many-many relationship. Decide for yourself how well that works in English.