English as the lingua franca of Europe: a Dutch perspective

In this article,. I will discuss the position of English as an international language, as a lingua franca in Europe. I will do this from the perspective of a non-native speaker of English, and this is indeed the most relevant perspective if we want to discuss the question 'which English for Europe?', because it is non-native speakers who know and experience what kind of problems they encounter in using English. This summer I spent two weeks on the island of Sicily, and visited the Etna region. To my pleasant surprise, I found a village Linguaglossa on one of the slopes of the Etna, and this reminded me of the fact that bilingualism is a very old and wide-spread phenomenon in Italy and in Europe in general, and has enriched the life of Europeans for many centuries. The word linguaglossa is thus similar in flavour to the compound Eurotaal coined by professor Sergio Scalise as the name of the Bologna conference held in October 2000 on the language situation in Europe, a compound of which the head taal is the Dutch word for 'language', whereas the first part Eurois a pan-European root.