English in Europe

It has always struck me as a little odd that just as much of the world seems to be adopting English for certain purposes, Americans are getting worried about the status of English in the United States. Here's the situation in Europe, according to Tony Judt in Postwar:

To one side stood a sophisticated elite of Europeans: men and women, typically young, widely traveled and well-educated, who might have studied in two or even three different universities across the continent. Their qualifications and professions allowed them to find work anywhere across the European Union: from Copenhagen to Dublin, from Barcelona to Frankfurt. High incomes, low airfares, open frontiers and an integrated rail network ... favoured easy and frequent mobility. For the purposes of consumption, leisure and entertainment as well as employment this new class of Europeans traveled with confident ease across their continent --communicating, like medieval clercs wandering between Bologna, Salamanca and Oxford, in a cosmopolitan lingua franca: then Latin, now English.

Sounds very much like the world our friend Joey Sobrino travels in when he is in Europe.

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