Arnold Platon Profile picture
Sep 19, 2020 12 tweets 6 min read Read on X
The languages used in 🇪🇺 @EU_Commission President’s annual State of the European Union speeches 💬 #SOTEU

A thread 🧵 1/
Wednesday, @POLITICOEurope published and interesting article on the languages used by @vonderleyen in her first #SOTEU2020 speech. In it they made a surprising claim: that UvdL had abandoned his predecessor’s balanced use of English, French and German. 2/

Out of skepticism and curiosity I went through all the #SOTEU speeches (on @europarlAV ) to see how the 🇪🇺 EU’s three working languages were employed.

I used timeshare of each language because original transcripts for these speeches do not exist.

So here is what I found:
3/
The person who came up with the State of the European Union speech, Commission president José Manuel Barroso had zero consideration for any balance.

German was never used, and French was only used in 2011, for one third of the speech.

Not a word of his native Portuguese. 4/
Jean-Claude Juncker was the first to use all three languages, and even employed a bit of Portuguese, Dutch and Italian at the end of his 2016 speech. But he had no “balance”, and the proportion and use within the speech of each language varies from one year to another. 5/
There is a notable decline 📉 of English after Brexit, it's true, and an uptick 📈 of French, but the picture is a volatile one. German peaks in 2017 at 40%, while French peaks in 2018 at 73%.

Against this backdrop, UvdL’s meager 7% French looks bad, catastrophic even, but… 6/
It’s worth noting that both French and German are official in Luxembourg, and thus “native” to @JunckerEU , while French is a foreign language to UvdL, just like English.

The difference here being that English is by far the most studied and used lingua franca in Europe. 7/
I think, looking at the charts, that each Commission president has a different style in their language use, influenced by their education, their native language, and their vision of how they should communicate with the European public.

Some are better at #SOTEU than others.

8/
Now that Brexit is done and ~60 milion English speakers are no longer EU citizens, some Anglophiles fear, and some Francophiles hope (😉 @quatremer), that the status of English will decline.

This, I fear is a misjudgment of the European linguistic landscape...

9/
Two things of note:

No Commission president, as far as I can tell, has used even a word from a language of “New Europe” (i.e. a language of one of the Central and Eastern countries).

The best speech, imho, and most emotional one, is Juncker’s 2017 State of the Union

10/
And a final linguistic caveat:

I have no idea if Juncker used Luxembourgish in his speeches. I don’t speak German, so I can’t distinguish between the two. My intuition makes me lean towards “no Luxembourgish used” but I’m open to corrections.

11/

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More from @Arnold_Platon

Sep 13
This reminds me that while both Romanians and the French both socialize a lot via complaining, the assumptions and philosophy underpinnings of these "complainings" are very different.

Me trying to complain here like back home really falls flat.

Here's why:
1/
The Romanian complains about all that the injustices the universe throws at him, but alas there is little one can do.

It's a fatalistic sort of complaint where the bond is created through the shared experience of being victims to the whims of a cruel fate/universe/etc.

2/
The French on the other hand suffer and bond from a place of high expectation that fellow human beings fail to meet.

They complain, in essence, that the universe owes them perfection, things should be in a certain way, yet the unacceptable happens. To them, personally.

3/
Read 4 tweets
Dec 26, 2023
Having executed the Ceaușescus a day earlier, on 26 December, 34 years ago, the Council of the National Salvation Front in Bucharest 🇷🇴 issued "Decree-Law Nº 1" repealing the most hated laws of Romanian communist regime

A short thread on some of these laws
1/🧵 Image
"In order to immediately eliminate from the Romanian legislation some of the laws and decrees issued by the former dictatorial regime, normative acts with a profoundly unjust character and contrary to the interests of the Romanian people, the Council of the NSF decrees:"

2/
"The following laws, decrees and other normative acts are and remain repealed:

1. All the decrees by which titles and orders of Romania were granted to Ceaușescu Nicolae and Ceaușescu Elena."

[Like all dictators they loved titles and medals]
Image
Image
Read 16 tweets
Jul 9, 2022
There have been various things happening in south-eastern 🇷🇴 Romania with regards to the war in Ukraine. Especially related to railways and ports, mostly for the export of grain.

A mildly chaotic, slow moving thread🧵 bringing various info together.

1/?
First of all, a link to an older thread of mine with extracts from a Liberation article on the links between 🇺🇦 Odesa and the port of 🇷🇴 Constanța.

2/

A reminder that in April the transport scheme (see maps below) involved going from Odesa to Bilhorod-Dniestrovsky and then down to the Danube ports. Since then the situation on the ground evolved both in a positive and negative way...

3/

Read 47 tweets
Apr 17, 2022
This made me curious about what might be happening in Constanța, the closest harbour to southern 🇺🇦, given the blockade on the Ukrainian ports and the need to divert trade headed there.

Found an interesting article by @libe / @nellydidelot

A thread 🧵1/

Starts off interviewing Denys a 🇺🇦 boatswain of the "Chalsi", docked in C-ța 🇷🇴.

Ship has a 12 man crew, half 🇺🇦, half 🇷🇺. The interviewee's wife is a refugee in Orléans, France.

«It's not a problem, we're seafarers first and foremost. We don't let politics get between us»

2/ Image
Built in 1968, ship's 138 m long and registered in Micronesia 🇫🇲. It's mixed crew is symbolic, as Russians and Ukrainians represent 14% of the workforce on world merchant navy.

This also meant that when war started & 🇺🇦 sea was closed, they feared docking in 🇷🇺 as usual.

3/
Read 13 tweets
Mar 7, 2021
Opa, Dasymetric Style! 🗺️🕺

The 2019 🇪🇺 European Elections mapped (by winner & turnout), using the 1km² population grid from @EU_Eurostat to exclude uninhabited areas.

Third attempt to take into consideration only populated areas, because "land doesn't vote" 1/ ImageImage
Previous attempts made use of @CopernicusLand land use raster layer. Below is an animated transition, on black background, with details in the subsequent thread

Many low density zones were not mapped as "Built areas" so much more map area was excluded 2/

Changing the background to white didn't help much. Still too difficult to make out. 3/

Read 6 tweets
May 20, 2019
The #EP2019 elections are upon us this week, so let's take a look back to where the current groups in the European Parliament got their votes from (in high detail).

A thread 1/
Center-right @EPPGroup did best in Hungarian-minority areas of 🇷🇴🇸🇰 and German-speaking South Tyrol 🇮🇹.

I does generally well in Hungary, Germany (especially Bavaria), Slovenia and Croatia, Latvia, Poland (especially Silesia) and northern Iberia.

Weak in France and Italy.2/
Center-left @TheProgressives had a good score in Romania (especially the S and E), in Sweden, Slovaki as well as Bulgaria & southern Iberia.

Industrial areas of the UK, western Germany, Wallonia 🇧🇪 and Central Italy also high. +Overseas

It's the only group present in all 🇪🇺 3/
Read 10 tweets

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