Comment by tzs
1 month ago
The Netherlands is in the EU. English is the most widely spoken language in the EU, even after the UK left, because it is by far the most common second language. Nearly half of the people in the EU can speak it.
In Northern Europe the percentage is even higher. In the Netherlands there are almost as many people who speak it as there are Dutch speakers.
Taking into account people from other EU countries who are there on business plus tourists there is a good chance that if only one language was to be used for train announcements more people on the train would understand if it was in English then if it was in Dutch.
This is imperial mentality. Dutch is the language of the Netherlands not English and they have the right to use it.
If we follow your line Dutch will go the same way as Welsh or Basque.
And the dutch aren’t very well known for their imperial mentality?
The Dutch were ridiculously bad at imposing their language on other countries. Little trace of it remains in Indonesia, or New York. Aruba, Curaçao and Sint Maarten have never taken to it. South Africa is kind of the exception except even then Afrikaans has played second fiddle to English for 150 years, and they have sought to differentiate their language from Dutch in more recent times.
Portugal has been better at that game when you consider its size.
> If we follow your line Dutch will go the same way as Welsh or Basque.
No it won't. Mirroring important announcements in two languages is a thing most countries do, and their languages are far from extinct.
It already is, mate. There are people who move to countries such as the Netherlands, Iceland and Sweden and insist on using English all the time. I've even heard of Dutch using English with each other. There are people who've attempted this in Spain, but it's harder there since there are so many Spanish speakers.
The ongoing non-adoption of Esperanto remains one of the world's many tragedies.
Yes and no. Esperanto has strengths and weaknesses, and some see it as Eurocentric, but let's just leave it at that.
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Ideally announcements should be bilingual, but if there’s only one language, it’s better to inconvenience any number of foreigners than even a single native who doesn’t speak English.
In Switzerland, on some trains there are trilingual announcements: German, Italian, French.
Nobody suggested that dutch announcements should be removed. You can make announcements in two languages.
Why have Dutch at all? "They all speak English."
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Thanksfully, dutch is reasonnably easy to understand (not to speak) if you know english and the actual context.
Or maybe that is just me having grown to understand dutch and flemish as a cyclocross rider and spectator.