Grin's Report

The professor of the Geneva University and an expert on language economics François Grin published in October 2005 a comprehensive dossier, in which he analyzes the language policy of the European Union. The study was requested by the council to assess the system of instruction (French Haut Conseil de l' évaluation de l' école ) and published.

The report

The report asks the question: " What would be relative to the working languages ​​in the European Union, the optimal choice? "

The Swiss economist proposes a comparison between three possible scenarios:

Completion of the report

The third option, Esperanto, appears to be the solution that is most cost-effective and realized most equitable, but Grin currently holds to be impossible due to the strong prejudices against Esperanto based on simple ignorance. Still, he regards it as strategically possible for a new generation, under two conditions:

• A comprehensive information campaign throughout the EU about language inequality and Esperanto.
• Cooperation of all Member States in the campaign.

This could be saved 25 billion euro net the EU each year. " 85 % of the EU population has in mind a direct and obvious interest ," Professor Grin.

The most amazing conclusion is that Britain occupies 17-18 billion euros annually due to the currently existing dominance of the English language, which is three times the British rebate, or 1 % of UK GDP. In other words, subsidize all 394 million EU residents do not have English as their first language, even the poorest of the recently acceded countries, every year the British economy.

This amount results from the sale of books, other products related to the English language and by the 700,000 people who visit England to learn the language; moreover, from the savings by the neglect of foreign language teaching in British schools. It 's not about the totality of economic transfers from linguistic grounds to the United Kingdom. Rather, it is around 75 % of these transfer payments, which the author considers as the fruit of the general predominance of English. The rest he leads back to the demographic weight of the language itself.