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I read that the French,(now that Britain has left the EU) is pushing that all meetings be held in French.
On what basis? If the criteria is that of the most spoken language, why not Spanish or Chinese?
Personally if I had to chose, Italian is a more expressive language, and German a more efficient workhorse.
To my knowledge English has hitherto been established as the language for international communication. That has nothing to do with Brexit. Should that change or change inside EU, I think there must be established common criteria for, of course, each EU country would prefer its own language.
More Europeans speak German than French. French used to be the lingua franca, and before that Latin, and before that ancient Greek. Or they could try Esperanto. I think France is usually the only country to sing in their own language (apart from the UK) in the Eurovision Song Contest. I think they should all speak Finnish. It has at least fifteen grammatical cases. I think the mental stimulation would do them good.
We British are terrible at languages as a whole. We have an arrogance I must admit to not understanding why others do not speak English. Hence the old caricature of us speaking to other indigenes very slowly or very loud in English; as if that would break through the communication barrier. I did French at school. Hated it as one has to move ones mouth. German was much easier and logical. Italian I fell in love with much later in life; even all the hand gestures.
I think Italian is really Tuscan, the language Dante Aligheri wrote in. I once watched a YouTube video of people speaking the different Italian dialects. I would have said they were different languages. They wee as different to each other as Italian is to Spanish, at least it seemed so to me. Italian is a pretty language, unlike Dutch. The syllables are all distinctly pronounced, unlike French. The spelling is consistent, unlike English. Grammatically it is easier than German. I have studied Latin and Italian, and Italian is definitely easier.