A blog about Europeans and the Implications of the diverse languages spoken across Europe
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A Spaniard In Germany
2nd Culturally Diverse Scenario,
Suppose you are like Maria from “Problems in Europe from Language Barriers” and you want to find a job in Germany but don’t speak the German language. You cannot stay in Spain because there is not a high demand for your field of work. What do you do?
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Problems in Europe from Language Barriers
Check out this post about the EU and the problems it faces due to Language barriers. The post describe the trials and tribulations of people living in North and South Europe and their stark differences in language.
The objective of the European Union might be to make it easier for people to relocate for jobs, but a recent study has shown that the different languages that are spoken within the EU prevent workers from obtaining positions in companies abroad.
When the European Union was founded, people envisioned one big labour market that allowed people from all over Europe to work in the country where their skills were needed. However, this vision never became a reality. Even though diplomas in the EU are valid all over the European Union, the language barriers between the different countries prevents workers from relocating: only 3% of the people in the European Union that are of a working age live in a country that’s different from their native one. Especially young people are now caught in a so-called ‘language trap’ which prevents them from moving to other European countries. The country that is especially in demand is Germany where, contrary to the southern countries, companies are in desperate need of new employees.
Take for example of a language trap ‘victim’ is Maria Menendez. Maria is 25 years old and lives in Spain. She has a diploma in the vetinarian field and has two master’s degrees, but despite the fact that she has sent out about 1,000 CVs last year, she is struggling to find a job. The vetinarian market in Spain is rapidly declining as Spaniards spend less and less money on their pets. Maria is also qualified to work in an agricultural company as the in-house vet, but this field isn’t hiring new employees either.
The opposite is happening in Germany at the moment: in all of northern Europe, there is a shortage of employees because of low birth rates and the need for workers with specialized skills. Menendez says she has found plenty of jobs that would fit her degree. The only problem? They all require a good command of the German language. Moreover, the knowledge of the German language that is needed for most available jobs is very specialised.
Raimund Becker, head of the German Federal Employment Agency’s division for foreign and specialist recruitment: ‘If you want to work as an engineer you’ll need a certain specialist vocabulary…Even colloquial German isn’t enough.’
Most people from the south of Europe haven’t focussed on German but on English in high school and believe it is the lingua franca of the EU. It is true that most multi-national companies use English, but most smaller companies use the language of the country they are based in. This is why a great deal of people used to move to London to find a job, but as the economy in the United Kingdom is also struggling, this is no longer the case.
However, there appears to be a light at the end of the tunnel. The German Federal Employment Agency has announced a 40 million Euro investment in programmes that will teach German to Europeans between 18 and 35 to learn German. After this education, people like Maria, whose degrees would be accepted in Germany because of EU rules, will be able to find a job in Germany.
The number of Spaniards that are learning German might be on the rise, but actual the number of Spanish people working in Germany itself is still quite low. According to new research, less than 5,000 Spanish workers have left the country to work in Germany. A very small amount when you compare it to the 4.7 million people in the country that don’t have a job. An explanation for this could be the fact that many Spaniards have turned their focus to South America. As the cultures and languages spoken on the continent are related to Spain, it is easier for Spaniards to adapt to these than to the culture of Germany and the German language, which is fairly difficult to learn for Spanish people.
This trend means much needed labour force is moving away from the European Union. As it would be a little far-fetched for us to replace this work force with employees from outside of the EU, measurements must thus be taken to make employment in the European Union more appealing.
Credits: Language Barrier preventing EU Relocation Website
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The Netherlands
Check out this passage about how the Netherlands made their own language standard.
��In the Netherlands, an endogenous standard was able to develop from the 16th century onwards, resulting in a variety generally considered as ‘fully standardized’ (Grondelaers & Van Hout, 2011, p. 199). Since the end of the 20th century however, Poldernederlands, a type of language marked especially by a lowered realization of the first element of Standard Dutch diphthongs [ɛ.i], [œ.y] and [ɔ.u], is said to be an important competitor for the existing standard language (Stroop, 1998, Van Bezooijen, 2001). Speaker evaluation experiments have shown that young Dutch women subconsciously evaluate Poldernederlands more positively than older Dutch women, indicating ‘a bright future for Polder Dutch’ (Van Bezooijen, 2001, p. 257). To what degree Poldernederlands has to be seen as an instance of either destandardization or demotization is however unclear, as is the question whether this type of language is actually new (Smakman, 2006, p. 50). Research into Poldernederlands is fairly limited and seems to be only partly embedded in the international context, leaving many questions unanswered. Within the Netherlandic context, more sociolinguistic attention has been devoted to the question to what degree regional accents are currently being accepted within standard Netherlandic Dutch. Production data have shown increasing accent variation in Standard Dutch (Van de Velde, 1996), and some of the available perception data point at communal acceptance of this variation. Grondelaers, Van Hout & Steegs (2009), Grondelaers & Van Hout (2010) and Grondelaers & Van Hout (2011, p. 209-213) for instance present speaker evaluation data showing that Dutch listener-judges share attitudinal evaluations of the Randstad, Limburg and Groningen accent, with the Randstad accent being evaluated as the most prestigious one, and southern sounding speakers upgraded in terms of personal integrity and the aesthetic value of their speech. As there appeared to be no demographic bias in the ratings, Grondelaers & Van Hout (2011, p. 213) argue that ‘regional accent variation has become an in-alienable ingredient of spoken Netherlandic Standard Dutch’ and that the norm is being demoticized, including regional accent variation by means of downward norm relaxation. The question however arises to what degree the available data suffice for the latter claim, considering that these data indicate one regional accent being more prestigious than others.”
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The Standard Language
In recent years, Europe has changed it’s vocabulary norms in terms of production and usage. In this excerpt from “Studying Language Dynamics in Europe”, the writer goes to invite the idea of a standard language that isn’t so standard.
“societal factors such as immigration, globalization, democratization and in-formalization have led to changes in standard languages all across Europe, which are considered to be a threat to the uniformity – and in that way, even the standardness – of those languages.���
This increasing variability has led to concern and controversy among nonprofessional language users: Some refer to the decreasing level of education, others to spelling mistakes, there is controversy about what the norm should be, and about the fact that nobody abides by that norm, there is resistance against the influx of English loan words, there are complaints about sloppy pronunciation, about the fact that young people no longer read books, about the fact that fewer newspapers are being read, that text messaging style is on the increase, and that the tolerance against linguistic variation has gone too far. Everywhere in Europe, interestingly, the same issues are being mentioned (Van der Horst, 2008, p. 14, translated in Grondelaers & Kristiansen, 2013, p. 9).
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A Split Belgium
1st Culturally Diverse Scenario,
Brussels is a french-speaking city in northern Flemish-speaking Belgium. In this scenario, you are a parliament member, and the country wants to split in half. What do you propose should happen with Brussels in order to keep the peace?
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In Belgium,
the North and South are split into two different languages being spoken. There is the Dutch speaking Flemish in the North and the French Speaking Walloons in the South.
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Biliungualism
Europe is an extremely diverse stretch of land. With 44 countries, Europe has more languages spoken within it than all of North America. German is the most spoken language in Europe followed by Italian and English.
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Sources
Scholarly Peer-Reviewed Sources
Ghyselen, Anne-Sophie, Steven Delarue, and Chloé Lybaert. "Studying Standard Language Dynamics in Europe." Taal En Tongval, 68.2 (2016): 75-91.
Gal, Susan. "Contradictions of Standard Language in Europe: Implications for the Study of Practices and Publics*." Social Anthropology, 14.2 (2006): 163-181.
"Who Are the Europeans?." Science, 260.5115 (1993): 1767.
Ginsburgh, Victor. "Is There a Gender Bias in the Use of Foreign Languages in Europe?." Kyklos : International Review for Social Sciences, 66.4 (2013): 552-566.
Williams, Donald. "Multiple Language Usage and Earnings in Western Europe." International Journal of Manpower, 32.4 (2011): 372-393.
Other Sources
"Language Barrier preventing EU Relocation." Kwintessential UK. N.p., 13 Jan. 2017. Web. 29 Apr. 2017.
"About." Cracking the Language Barrier. N.p., n.d. Web. 29 Apr. 2017.
Social Science & Medicine, Volume 158, June 2016, Pages 43–51
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