A common critic we hear about an EU wide army is What language are they gonna speak but let’s forget Europe 2024,
Rome had a huge empire over the whole Europe, I may be wrong, but I don’t think that commoner spoke proper Latin in remote province. What happens when they join the legion ? Would the units be split by origin region (Dacian with Dacian, Lugdunumese with Lugdunemese) with only officer speaking latin ? Or would you merge legionaries from different province (So you have Tingitanian, a Lustitanian and a Thracian in the same unit) and give them a crash course in military latin (the way the french foreign legion does? ) Even going as far as Rome, Karl the great empire also spread over half of Europe, and modern European nation used to be way more multi-lingual than they are today, and most likely a random southerner/northerner in Britain, France or Germany couldn’t talk to each other.
So how did ancient armies managed the language question ?
Don’t Europeans know basic English? Uk, basic enough to exchange coordinates and stuff? I doubt u would need to have a large enough vocabulary for this.
The World wars for example were fought together in a time where English competency wasn’t as high as it is today.
EU wide force
No EU member has English as its main language
“They could simply use English!”
Anglos and the feeling of being at the center of everything, name a more iconic duo.
Edit: Ireland, does it even exist, right?
Ireland?
Don’t leprechauns speak Irish?
(I honestly just didn’t think about them, oops!)
I went there a couple months ago, and it seemed like all the native folks spoke Irish (Gaelic) to some degree. It was pretty surprising, I thought I’d have to go to the west coast to get away from English, but nope, signs everywhere were printed in Gaelic and even the first cabbie I encountered in Dublin was more than happy to chat about linguistics!
While I have no doubt that officer (and even most NCO) do know more than basic english, I have some doubts regarding the typical high-school drop out who enlists in the infantry.
So if you need to talk about geopolitic, aircraft maintenance or even coordinates two different group of soldier, NATO english would be fine. But how would a multi-lingual crew works on a warship ? What about a multi-lingual patrol ?
Why would a multilingual crew even exist? Wouldn’t an EU armed force be just like NATO without the US? Regiments and groups specific to countries instead of regiments involving multiple countries.