There were five points to be dealt with and therefore we asked five questions.
The first question was meant to find out
- what the general knowledge about EU was like
- the reasons why it was born
- who can have European citizenship
- an opinion about the Turkish entrance within the EU
- how many and which languages should be spoken.
My group analyzed the answers about languages. It is an interesting issue, mainly because we discovered two main trends: 39 of the interviewed (that is 65%) chose English as the most suitable common language, but 19 of the interviewed (about 31.7%) think every State should keep its language and besides several answers denied the necessity to use a common language or a few common languages.
However, it must also be said that the question posed could be considered under two different aspects: the debate about the languages regards the problem of which language or which languages should be made official languages and later used on an international level but the question could also be interpreted as one regarding the languages spoken on a local level.
Obviously, believing that every language is the result of a cultural background, local languages must be protected and it would be very difficult and no use leaving them out.
The question was not about the language to be used on the local level and, if we consider that only 65% of the interviewed chose English as the most suitable language to adopt on an international level, we will understand some people misunderstood the core of the issue.
Considering the data collected, it is very important to underline that in the tables we did not associate an only language to every interviewed but we calculated the occurences of every language in the economy of the answers so that every interviewed could express more than one choice.
If English is chosen equally both by men and women, it is men who mainly underline the importance of national languages, while two young women focused on the importance of one, common language, without making a concrete purposal. An alternative choice, preferred by 2 men and 1 woman, consists in wide-known languages, but the label is rather vague, because it may also be intended as including some extra-European or extra-EU languages, such as Chinese or Russian.
A lot of interviews showed that the necessity of more than one official language is also felt: 5 of the interviewed (about 8.3%) think Italian should be a good choice besides English mainly because of the importance of its literature and culture, 4 (about 6.7%) chose French considered it is widely spoken in the EU, 4 (about 6.7%) chose Spanish, because it is an important language all over the world, and 3 (5%) chose German.
Finally, considering EU Enlargement towards the Eastern Countries, 2 of the interviewed (about 3.3%) think it would be a worthy choice to include also a Slavic language to a Union official language.
But choosing a single language among lots of little-spoken Slavic languages would be a real problem. An interviewed spoke about Russian and he expressed the opinion that when Russia will join the EU, it would be a wise choice to make of Russian an official language, too.
After the analysis of the interview results, it is interesting to reflect about the effect of EU decisions on the European citizens’ lives. Nowadays, the concept of border has changed and European citizens are linked not only to their own nation but even to the nearby ones, so that working or making business abroad involve more and more people. Such a context develops a strong Multilingualism and it becomes more and more important to create a new model citizen, one who can speak and understand more than one language.
Moreover, every citizen should have the right to learn the languages spoken within the Union and, even if you can consider it a hard challenge, every Member State should guarantee such right. However, a common language could solve the problem and connect all national languages on a multilingual basis able to go beyod borders.