The plumber when checking the piping system of 153G room…, the Albert Heijn’s shop assistant in the cashier…, the civil servant when registering in the city hall…, the waitress of the budget restaurant of your neighbourhood…, any professor and any of your classmates at UvA…, the random old lady when being asked for directions in the street…, the ABN-AMRO’s clerk when opening a bank account…, the tram’s driver when being asked for the next stop…, the dim-witted bouncer in the disco…, the kids when being asked to play with us in the football pitch…, the clerk in the Postbank office when buying stamps…, the beggar when begging, …they all speak in English!!!
It’s staggering, especially when I compare it to where I come from, how it’s possible to “live in English” in Amsterdam. Here - almost - everyone speaks English, and when I say to speak means that they’re able to hold a conversation about a wide range of topics and at a more than superficial level of deepness. And it’s not only the case of the cosmopolitan Amsterdam, my (few) experiences around The Netherlands have shown me that also Dutch people from the countryside is able to speak in English well.
This fact has made me raise several questions to myself regarding the linguistic paradigm we have here in Europe…
As often it’s said, the English language is unifying Europe despite the - majority - “Euroscepticism” in the UK. In the case of The Netherlands, it seems reasonable to point out at several other reasons, besides globalisation, that explain this broad knowledge of the English language among the Dutch society; being neighbours of the UK, being the Dutch language a not much spread language in the world and being a rather little open economy seem good reasons.
In fact, the Dutch case may illustrate what may happen in the future in other European countries: the citizens will have a (national?) mother tongue - or more than one, Frysian may be the example here - while English will be the exchange language that will allow them to communicate with the other Europeans with a different mother tongue. But it isn’t going to be only about communicating, labour mobility may start to grow in Europe (especially inside the Schengen Treaty area), so English may become a kind of “European language” since the hosting society (once we have assumed that speaks English) will be able to “host” the European immigrants in a different way than the nowadays one – faster? easier? better? … - .
There’s no doubt that the issue concerning the integration of newcomers (and what it’s understood for “integration”) is anything but new in Europe, the Dutch case is a really good one to be studied. However, this (try of) reflection is aiming at what may be a novelty: the mobility of the European middle (middle-upper?) class, or, even more, the creation of a “EU-rooted class”.
Until now it seems that the immigrants are mainly low income people (it’s true that there’re cases like the Pakistani migrants in Europe, who belong to the Pakistani middle class and not to the poor majority of Pakistan’s inhabitants, but once in Europe their social status is usually lower than back home); the millions of people from Asia, Africa, America and Europe that got into the EU in the last decades (and are still doing so) were – mainly – rather poor people who were (and are) looking for better life conditions for them (and, especially, for their sons and daughters), so the word immigrant is associated to a kind of immigration: the immigration of the poor; while expatriate or other fancy words describe those immigrants whose income is higher and have a university degree.
However, what the spread of English as the exchange language among (all) Europeans may, eventually - and among other things - , cause it’s that it’ll be easier for the immigrant to settle herself/himself in other European societies; i.e. the English language will reduce the costs of moving for the EU’s labour force. If this outweighs the traditional mobility aversion in Europe, and wage differentials are kept (cultural/linguistical differences seem to weigh more nowadays than salaries), what may come up from it is the appearance of a relevant amount of EU citizens belonging to the middle and upper class that will move among the member states. And this, in a EU where a majority of the population will master English well enough, may lead to the situation where a small but wealthy part of the population of the member states will live without knowing the country’s language(s) and culture, a case that I wonder how much resembles to that one of an Erasmus student who comes to and lives for a certain period in Amsterdam without speaking (almost) a word of Dutch and being (almost) completely unaware of the Dutch society…
Compártelo
… ehem, I mean that it made me realize how “switched off” I’ve been in AMS.
