After Babel

[always good to contemplate this remarkable painting]

IN THE 17th century, educated people across central Europe could still communicate with each other in Latin. By the mid-19th century, the handiest language for a traveller through Mitteleuropa was the German spoken by the Habsburg monarchs who reigned over Hungarians, Czechs and many others. A little more than 100 years later, the dominant tongue was Russian.
Now the region's new language of choice for the 21st century is percolating upwards through the education system, and downwards from the business and political elite. It will be English, studied by three out of four secondary-school pupils from the Baltic to the Balkans.

Most central European countries have just joined, or are waiting to join, the European Union, and their accession is already reinforcing the dominance of English as a language for the EU as a whole. In central Europe, as in much of the world, knowledge of English has become a basic skill of modern life comparable with the ability to drive a car or use a personal computer.

What has happened to the other main languages? A majority of central Europeans have eschewed Russian as firmly as they have rejected the communist ideology which was once articulated in that tongue. Russian remains the second-most-studied foreign language in the Baltic countries, where there are large minorities of native Russian speakers and a thriving Russophone culture with them. But in Poland and Slovakia it has fallen to third place, and in Hungarian and Czech schools it is scarcely studied at all. That said, Russian still serves as a common language among older central Europeans schooled in communist times—including, ironically, the politicians whose generation helped drive out communism. Their arrival in the European Parliament has brought the sound of Russian small-talk into its corridors and tea-rooms.

The limited enthusiasm for German in central Europe has been much more surprising. Even in the communist era, it was taught at least as widely as English, being the language of a “fraternal” country, East Germany. In the post-communist era, Germany has been central Europe's biggest export market, and a huge investor in the region. Yet only in the Czech Republic, Hungary and Slovakia does the proportion of secondary-school pupils studying German come anywhere close to the proportion studying English; and nowhere in the region is German the top choice.

German has languished partly because Germany has been shy about promoting its language and culture in a region ravaged by Hitler's war. No such shyness has affected France. Its cultural diplomacy in the region has been vigorous and generous. Handsome French cultural centres ornament the capitals of the region: the newest of them will open in Riga, the Latvian capital, in October. But admiration for France's culture does not translate into widespread use of its language. Only in Romania—whose own vernacular is of Latin origin—does it exceed English in popularity.

The choice of English has been made easier by the demands of foreign investors. The first to move east were the most international European companies, which tended to use English as their international working language regardless of their base. The biggest foreign direct investor within central Europe for most of the past decade, Siemens AG of Germany, an engineering and telecoms firm, made English its main “corporate language” in 1998. “German companies are very pragmatic,” confirms Bernhard Welschke, head of European policy at the Federation of German Industry. They value a single language for business, he says, even if it is not their own.

If there is one German sector which begs to differ, it may be the entertainment industry, whose exports are limited by the international preference for English-language products. About 200m music CDs are sold each year within Germany, for example; but the country's most successful international act, Rammstein, a heavy-metal group, has sold only 6m CDs outside Germany in its ten-year history. “We are being left behind,” complains Björn Akstinat, director of the German Music Export Office, an industry association. He believes central Europe could be a growth market for German culture, and that the German government should try harder in its cultural diplomacy. Even now some non-Teutonic bands sing in German, says Mr Akstinat, pointing to Ich Troje, which represented Poland in last year's Eurovision song contest.

The rise of English as a lingua franca will not necessarily do much to diminish arguments over national languages within or between countries, in places like the Balkans or the Baltic states. Such arguments tend to be about the division of political power between rival communities, rather than about language as such. It may, on the other hand, have a big impact on the institutions of the European Union, and even on European integration. The EU recognises an official language for every country, and translates all main public documents into all 20 of those languages. But civil servants and committees within the EU's institutions use three main working languages: English, French and German. French has long been fighting a losing battle against English for “market share” among the three, with German far behind. The arrival of more countries favouring English will threaten to render French almost as marginal as German.

An increased use of English within the EU institutions will mean an increased use of it in the ministries of member states, where officials spend much of their time working on EU-related matters. Jean-François Deniau, of the Académie Française, a linguistic watchdog, told Le Figaro newspaper that English had conquered even the treasury directorate of the French finance ministry, which he called “the heart, the bastion, the stronghold of French power”. It now circulates drafts of new regulations in English “because they will be discussed in English in Brussels”.

One big question now is whether the generalised use of English as a first or second language will accelerate the political integration of the EU. The spread of English will lower the language barrier which has, arguably, obstructed pan-European political debate. It will open the way to the formation of pan-European public opinion, and to politicians with pan-European appeal. But there have been empires, like the Soviet one, which had common languages and still fell apart. A language can help a good political system work better, but it cannot rescue a bad one.

[Courtesy of The Economist]