Among those celebrating Britain’s “leave” vote were French politicians who saw the chance for their language to replace English as the EU’s lingua franca. “The English language has no legitimacy in Brussels,” said Robert Ménard, mayor of the southern French town of Béziers.
But English will not disappear from Brussels. It is decades since the supremacy of the English language owed anything to the UK’s role, or lack of one. But Britain’s one-time ruling of the waves, followed by US global dominance, means English is the language the world’s ambitious people learn.
Mastering a foreign language is a lifetime’s work. People do not lightly give up one to learn another. In the EU’s institutions, a Dane is not going to start speaking to, or emailing, a Pole in anything other than English, whatever official policy says. If, as some are suggesting, the EU begins insisting that recruits speak either French or German, it will suffer a severe shortfall in applicants.