Point taken. I shouldn’t have generalized to include our Paddies, with Irish having been adopted as an official language and all.

Still, I wonder what the numbers look like once you correct for LAD profiles.

It is a very appealing theory though. The very fact English has become a global lingua franca means native English speakers have no need to flex (hence train) their lingo muscles, which implies that -among others- through the 2nd language entry criterion the numbers of Brits and Irish remain low in the EC. This in turn increases the acceptability of English as a lingua franca to other EC nationals as the absence of native speakers in the institutions gives English a sort of innocuos Esperanto-like halo.
As I said… add more native English speakers to the mix and the current pax anglosaxonica might start oscillating into hitherto unfathomed bandwidths… Frogs getting real nasty, Germans retaliating…

As my favourite economist/linguist/cross-breed mongrel Van Parijs wrote “English native speakers should pay some form of tax as compensation for their language’s adoption as the EU’s lingua france”. This does strike me as an implict kind of tax.

Imagine all of a sudden we’d have about as many Brits as frogs in the EC. This would make the current bickering about which should be the lingua france (French to buy a coffee, English for more lofty purposes) even more vitriolic as then all those native tongue speakers would be seen to enjoy definite career advantages.This is the deal: we grab your language, turn it into some apish pidgin called “Euro-English”, in exchange you stay out.

(btw: the alumni I’ve met all seem to have more of an EPA-profile. This is not the type calling the shots… trying getting some multilingual quants in (or lord forgive, some legal types), but then again any quant worth his/her salt in mainland Europe already fled to London or New York, we’re left with the dregs from the keg anyhows).