February 11, 2005

THE ECONOMIST on Ernst Mary. Llink by email from Alex Schoellkopf who blogs at Pigilito says. He also has a link to a piece on the liabilities of an American accent from the IHT:
Brussels is a place where English has increasingly become the lingua franca, a shift from the earlier days of the European Union when press briefings, political consultations and conferences were held in French.

But these days in Brussels it matters what type of English you speak, according to those who, for reasons of education or because their parents once lived in United States, have acquired American accents ..

A Hungarian civil servant who studied in New York and worked in Brussels says her colleagues derisively called her "the American." A Frenchwoman who grew up in the United States and now works in the Brussels bureaucracy says she switches to French to assert her European credentials.

"Europe is full of people who speak two languages without an accent in either one," said Ilves [MEP]. "That's considered a plus. It's just that if you have an American accent, then there is this association.

"If someone has a prejudice against Americans, that's where you get a reaction." ..

[German lobbyist] Mettler [who spent five years in America] says the hostility and suspicions she detects when she meets fellow Europeans is a recent thing, a sign of the times. She does not remember having problems with her accent the last time she lived in Brussels, in 1999. But now, she says, she gets suspicious reactions "all the time." "When you speak with an American accent there is a certain assumption," she said. "It's not well looked upon."

Posted by Greg Ransom