Germany should make English official language

Here’s a great idea that unfortunately won’t become reality any time soon: Germany should recognise English as a second official language. So should most countries, in fact.
The idea popped up this month in a 10-point program put forth by the Free Democrats, the business-friendly and liberal junior partners in the German governing coalition. Their motivation is to attract half a million skilled immigrants per year, net of emigrants. This makes sense. Germany is an aging society that suffers from labor shortages and needs more international talent. But as a society, it’s much less open to newcomers — both bureaucratically and culturally — than traditional immigrant nations such as Canada, say. Another hurdle is German.
As Mark Twain authoritatively and charmingly put it, the language is “awful.” Only a deviant mind, given a clean slate, would construct a grammar with four cases and three genders, yielding a baffling array of permutations just for definite articles. By contrast, English has “the.” Nuff said.
Simplicity isn’t the only thing to commend English. Ubiquity is the big one. English is the obvious heir to such historical antecedents as Akkadian, Aramaic, Greek or Latin in being a lingua franca — that is, a common and near-universal means of communication. Its only rivals today are Mandarin in Asia and Spanish in the Americas.
In old Italian, lingua franca meant “Frankish tongue.” The term didn’t refer to Frankish — the Germanic dialect spoken by the Franks around the time they conquered Gaul — but to a new language spoken all around the Mediterranean during the late Middle Ages.
Also called sabir, this “Frankish” was actually a blend of Italian, Spanish, Arabic, Slavic, Greek and other dialects. It was therefore a pidgin, which later turned into a creole. A pidgin is a simplified mixture of existing tongues spoken as a second language to facilitate communication. A creole is a pidgin spoken by subsequent generations as a first language, with more standardised grammar and syntax.
English, according to some linguists, also started as a pidgin — a cocktail of Anglo-Saxon and Norman French, with bits of Norse and Celtic — before turning into a creole and a language. This evolution is ongoing. For example, Singapore English, also known as Singlish, began as a pidgin of English, Hokkien, Malay, Cantonese, Tamil and other ingredients, before turning into today’s colourful creole.
In its global rise, English has followed the classic career path of lingua francas throughout the ages, as Nicholas Ostler describes in “Empires of the Word.” It initially spread by migration (to North America and Australia, for example), then by “diffusion” (to India, say), as well as “infiltration,” the combination of the two.
Via global diffusion — through business and academic jargon, the reach of Hollywood, Silicon Valley and what have you — English has of late been spreading even faster. In places such as Scandinavia, it’s become almost a second first language. Sometimes using English just makes things easier. Other times it keeps the peace among native language communities that might otherwise be at each other’s throats, as in Singapore, India or the Philippines.

—Bloomberg