So I came across this post from the very liked (by me) Jean Quatremer of "Libération".
In that article he elaborates on the fact that the English language is all too pervasive in the EU institutions and how that's bad for everyone, particularly his country's elite. His argument, although I don't agree with it, should not be dismissed altogether. As the national of a small country with a beautiful and flexible language and a phenomenally imponent body of European, African and South American literature, I understand the "saudade" we may feel towards our own languages but to use it to argue what he argues seems insulting, sad and oh so cliché for a Frenchman to do.
His hypothesis runs something like this: "Language is an important channel of communication. Some ideas are inherently better articulated in one language than in another, if for no other reason that they might have developed in the context of the evolution of that (language's) society. So to favour one language to another (or many others), deprives us of the contributions (intellectual and, in this specific case, political) originating elsewhere (where another language is spoken)."
This is tantamount to arguing that some ideas are inherently French, or for that sake, English, Portuguese, Hungarian, Swedish, or whatever. And not in the sense that they belong to that culture, but that they can only be expressed in that language. So I don't agree.
