The impact of these different languages bleeding one into the other is immediately visible in the official communications of European institutions. When communicating in English, EU officials have developed a vocabulary that differs from that of any recognised form of English, despite its obvious roots in the British and Irish variants of the language. Official publications of the EU contain the most valuable indication of the development of an independent ‘European English’ variant – or Euroenglish as it’s taken to be called – with its own language quirks, particularly (but not exclusively) when it comes to vocabulary.

Some of the new structures introduced by this Euroenglish in EU publications consist of quite standard grammatical mistakes made by those who speak English as a second language, ranging from making uncountable nouns countable, to using ‘of’ as an all-purpose preposition for everything and anything. Others, more peculiarly, are straight-up invented or repurposed words. This includes two main categories of vocabulary variations which constitute a break from standard English: invented words, and terms which exist in English but have been repurposed in context or meaning.

New Words

Many words which Euroenglish has come up with are traditionally modelled on a Romance language, often French. Take, for example the word ‘planification’, which comes up fairly regularly in official documents but is not, in fact, a standard English word at all. This term is a direct adaptation (also known as a calque) from the Spanish planificación or the French planification, which describe the process of planning, and is used with this same definition in the EU’s English version.

The most extraordinarily bizarre lexical term introduced by the EU during the unconscious development of Euroenglish, however, does not come from a Romance language. The word ‘actorness’ has been introduced in EU-speak to describe ‘the quality of being an actor’. If you’re wondering why the EU is concerned with movie stars, you’re not alone in your confusion.

‘Actor’ is indeed traditionally used in the UK and Ireland to describe someone who performs in plays or films, but in this case the EU has adopted a less intuitive definition of ‘actor’ more commonly used in the US: ‘the people or organisations involved in doing something’. This word has a more than dubious pedigree: not only does it use a definition of ‘actor’ which is not commonly understood by the general public in Europe, but it also incorrectly adds to it the suffix -ness, which elsewhere in standard British English is only applied to adjectives and participle.

Another stunning verb which has become rooted in EU-speak is that of ‘visaing’. As it is generally understood, a visa is ‘an official authorisation appended to a passport, permitting entry into and travel within a particular country or region’. The fact that there should be a verb ‘to visa’ is already dubious on its own, given the particular meaning of the noun, however a limited amount of online dictionaries do seem to report a nonstandard use of this verb, with the meaning of ‘to give a visa to (a passport)’. What’s for sure, though, is that this supposed verb isn’t used in the general sense of ‘to give approval (to anything)’, as the European institutions have taken to doing.

Repurposed Words

Other words are used with wildly different meanings or in different contexts from those traditionally used by native English speakers. Here, too, Romance-originated ‘false friends’ are the primary culprit. In this category, we note the verb ‘to dispose (of)’, which in standard English commonly means ‘to get rid of’. In Euroenglish, the meaning has somehow done a one-eighty: it is now used to mean ‘to have’, ‘to possess’. One can’t help to note the similarity with the Italian verb disporre di, which indeed means ‘to have’.

Another word which might sound funny to English speakers in context is the verb ‘to animate’. Imagine this – you’re reading a job advertisement for a European institution, and you come across the following sentence: ‘We are looking for a head of sector to animate twelve staff members’.

Now, you would not be to blame if the first thing to pop into your mind were that the European Commission is looking for a necromancer to bring twelve employers to life. That is indeed the most used definition of the verb. You would also not be to blame if you imagined the Commission was looking for an artist to make an animated doodle of twelve employers – that’s the second most common definition of the word. But (un)fortunately, you’ll find the Commission is simply looking for someone to lead a team with twelve staff members.

The list could go on, ranging from the word ‘instance’ to mean ‘a decision-making authority’, ‘delay’ to refer to a deadline, or ‘introduce’ to mean ‘submit’.

A final note needs to be made of the use of the word ‘axis’, which is used in Euroenglish in two different contexts, both of which confusing to a native English speaker. Traditionally, this word is only used in the context of politics (e.g. the Axis powers), anatomy or geometry. The EU has instead derived a completely different definition: an axis is a coherent group of measures with specific goals. As if that weren’t perplexing enough, its plural is axes, like that of axe. Confused yet? Wait until you hear this: the EU also sometimes uses ‘axes’ to refer to major roads.

Is Euroenglish a problem?

Many of these new terms may sound quite bizarre for the average ‘Anglo-Saxon’ speaker, yet they are taken at face value by most in the EU bubble, as well as by many second-language English speakers in Europe (and particularly by Romance languages speakers). But should we be worried about the continued warping of the English language by the European Union? Yes and no.

From a linguistic point of view, it is undoubted that, regardless of the EU, English has already developed as a lingua franca with a separate set of rules. Standard models of native English are commonly set aside in international communication, so there is no longer any impelling need to follow native speaker usage. One could go even further, and argue that such a de-Anglicised English allows the EU to maintain a supranational cultural and linguistic identity. It is also true, from a practical point of view, that inside the European institutions the use of Euroenglish is understood by all and does not generally create issues in the internal workings of the bloc.

However, this language use is problematic in terms of the EU’s transparency and external communication to citizens. Those who access Union documents in English will likely face a comprehension barrier that goes beyond content itself. It is unfair to expect simple citizens to be familiar with the specific use of in-house jargon of the EU – especially where this concerns misapplied English rules or words unavailable in a standard English dictionary. The result is that this makes the workings of the European Union, which are already fairly complex, even more incomprehensible to the average person.

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The Power Language Index (PLI) tries to establish which of these languages is the most important and influential. If the number of speakers was the decisive criterion, the Chinese Mandarin, official language of China (and Taiwan), would be the winner, but this is not the case.

The PLI includes different series of factors:

1. Geography – The ability to travel
2. Economy – The ability to participate in an economy
3. Communication – The ability to engage in dialogue
4. Knowledge and media – The ability to consume knowledge and media
5. Diplomacy – The ability to engage in international relations

By combining 20 indicators of these five different criterions, we can identify the 10 most powerful languages and six of them are Europeans (see the table below).

English is by far the most powerful language. It is the dominant language of three G7 nations (USA, UK and Canada), and British legacy has given it a global footprint. It is the world’s lingua franca. Mandarin, which ranks second, is only half as potent. Then we’ve French, Spanish, Arabic and Russian. These first six languages are also the official languages of the United Nations.

The remaining four in the top 10 include the two other BRIC languages (Portuguese and Hindi), and the tongues of two economic heavyweights (Germany and Japan).

English, French, Spanish, German and Portuguese are also five of the 24 official languages of the European Union, which instead of searching a common one has asserted that it is in favour of linguistic diversity.

In the Charter of Fundamental Rights, legally binding since its inclusion in the Lisbon Treaty, the EU declares that it respects linguistic diversity (Article 22) and prohibits discrimination on grounds of language (Article 21). Respect for linguistic diversity is a fundamental value of the European Union, in the same way as respect for the person, openness towards other cultures, and tolerance and acceptance of other people.

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