Eurodan in English

Don't wanna talk about the way I am,
I only try to make you understand
So sings Max in this year's soulful German Eurovision entry.

Even Germans who are really rather good at English find the complexities of the present tense impossible to grasp. And who can blame them. After all, it's not so easy to explain that it should be 'I'm just trying to make you understand', but that when they say 'My name is Matthias Mustermann and I'm working for DG Trade' that they've got it wrong again.

The thing which interests me is that I get the feeling that these complexities are becoming increasingly irrelevant.

Take the first example - the lovely Max singing his Eurovision song. Most of his audience certainly didn't have English as their native language, and in fact the British audience was probably the very least interested in him, judging by the UK's attitude to most European music. So why the hell should he care about niceties like the difference between the present simple and the present continuous?

And as for a presentation being given in a European institution, well the same thing is true, really. Out of the twenty-five countries present, only two are English native speakers (soon to be just one if the UKIP gets its way). And so it seems that Euro-English is in the ascendancy.

Saying 'I'm working for DG Trade' rather than 'I work for DG Trade' when talking about your permanent job (rather than a temporary action) is probably easier for most of the non-natives to understand - after all, 'ing' normally means a continuing action, n'est-ce pas?

So let's celebrate both varieties. After all - given the contempt with which most of the UK media (and custodians of native English) regard the mainland of Europe, it would be laughable to claim ownership of this new language. It's not for us, and it's not by us. It's for Swedes to speak to Estonians, and so on.

It's a brave new language, full of things which are 'globalised' (in the sense of native English 'aggregated') and controls (which you and I might call 'inspections'). And where we see us (rather than each other) later.

Posted by Eurodan at June 18, 2004 5:10 PM