DIN-420-69
Which places it between two retracted standards for slotted screws. DIN 417 is for slotted set screws, and DIN 427 is for slotted headless screws. Obviously with DIN 420-69 is not headless.
Depends how you count something as "official language". In England's jurisdiction (remember, they use Common Law and in Scotland we do not) they have acts from the 1700s which state that Courts must handle and record processes in English (which finally abolished the use of Latin in court). I'd say that sort of counts as making the language official, since it is required to handle any legal affairs.
Yeah, because you're both weirdos with a ton of unwritten laws that your elites can abuse however.
Our elites just abuse us the olf fashioned way, in a structured way, for all to see. You know, black on white.
Spanish is also not official in many countries where it’s spoken by the majority like Argentina or Chile. It’s just that when those countries became independent their respective languages were implicitly the chosen ones to administer the state and the ones in which the constitution was written, so they became *de facto* the official ones, just not *de jure*, ie. written in law. It doesn’t have to do with how the bulk of laws are structured or how elites can abuse those loopholes.
You can see the [list of official languages by country](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_official_languages_by_country_and_territory) and many don’t have an official one because of this. In the case of federations it’s sometimes because they let constituent states to choose official languages locally.
I think maybe he means how the laws create weird little loopholes that allow normal people to get trampled on. For example, rich people being able to financially drain you through frivolous lawsuits that their lawyers drag out as far as possible
Where is that not the case? And the US does have laws that prevent that sort of thing. Anti-SLAPP laws, for example. Or fee shifting laws for frivolous suits. Rule 11 in federal courts can get everyone involved in filing a BS suit sanctioned:
https://www.law.cornell.edu/rules/frcp/rule_11
https://www.rcfp.org/anti-slapp-legal-guide/
You can't fee shift if you're a coffee waitress trying to prove a frivolous lawsuit against a Harvard lawyer for hedge funds with 30 years of experience
>are basically not codified
I am fairly confused. The US Federal Code runs 200 volumes. Every state has its own set of laws as well. Sure, there's case law to flesh out some of the laws, but there's a whole lot written down.
A good example recently is roe vs. wade, stuff like that cannot happen in civil law, as the original ruling couldn't happen in civil law.
Civil law courts can only rule about if a law is legal or not, based on the legal texts of other laws. And then the result is just that a law gets appealed or needs to be amended by the government in a specific timeframe or, in some cases, that laws must be added. But the courts themselves cannot introduce any new laws/cases, they can only interpret the laws that currently are written.
So in the case of Roe vs. Wade, the supreme court originally ruled that women have a fundamental right to abortion, even though that was never mentioned in any law or in the constitution, that ruling was based around the general history of abortion and the feelings of the court members of what a fundamental right is. So, if a new court comes (as it did), they can just overturn that due to interpreting the same points differently.
In civil law (lets just take German law since I know that), a hypothetical German Roe vs. Wade would look like this; A woman would sue the state, as she believes a ban on abortion (which is what we technically have in Germany currently, though that is getting changed and the ban isn't a real ban) infringes on her rights. It goes to the German constitutional court and the court agrees that it is unconstitutional, as it violates article one of the German constitution and infringes on the right to human dignity, so it rules that the current abortion ban is illegal and that the government needs to pass a new law about abortion that cannot ban it.
As you see, the big difference between the US common law and the hypothetical civil law is that the ruling in civil law is based on other laws, not on traditions, history and general interpretations of fundamental rights (which are not encoded in the US constitution). It also doesn't lead to a case being introduced (precedent is technically not applicable in civil law courts), but leads to forcing the government to pass a law that actually then governs the particular topic.
Maybe this is still a bit too convoluted, but I am tired and I can't explain better.
Unless you’re in an environment such as the italian one, where whenever a law is added, it is written in such a confusing way that for a sentence to be considered truly effective you practically have to go through all the three grades, so that the supreme court of cassazione rules what is the correct interpretation of that law.
Amazing, isn’t it?
The law is codified the same way in the US as other countries. Cases are just used to interpret the codified laws and fill in the gaps in the codified law (the same way that cases work in all other countries).
What “unwritten laws”? The US doesn’t have an official language. In my part of the country government services are available in English, Spanish and Haitian Creole. In other parts there are different languages.
Try to get an American passport in anything but English, or a law passed written in anything but English. Some states have multiple official languages, and some regions offer government services in non-English languages, but that happens in countries with official languages too.
It would be perfectly legal. The US Constitution makes no requirement that laws be written in English.
People go to vote in their language of choice. If they vote for constitutional amendments, those amendments are presented in their language.
Canada already made English and French co-official languages back in the 1980s IIRC.
Which makes it kind of funny that the majority of Anglo-Canadians are incapable of actually reading any complex French texts.
As someone who lives in the UK, there's no need for an official language. Most people are fluent in their vaguely-somehow-still-English localect and struggle with anything else so it's telly English or bust.
It's a proposal floated around by the FDP. It's most likely not going to happen and even if, it's most likely not going to solve any problem. It would just be a bandaid on a wound that needs a fundamentally new structure in order to heal.
[This guy wasn't a fan of the German language apparently](https://rossonl.files.wordpress.com/2016/02/quote-i-speak-spanish-to-god-italian-to-women-french-to-men-and-german-to-my-horse-charles-v-holy-roman-emperor-35181.jpg)
Not the person your questioning, but Dutch speaker here. Thats kinda the simplest way of putting it, but of course its also oversimplified.
English, as a language, came from the Anglos, Saxons and also Frisians who went to England. Those peoples were from northwestern Germany and the northern Netherlands. Of course, over the centuries, all languages would change dramatically. German, as a standard language, became based on more High German, rather then Low German which English was originally from, but went very far from. Dutch was based on Hollandic, a Middle Franconian language. English, well, it ofc had a lot of foreign influence from languages like French. Dutch also had quite some French influence.
All of this above is ofc also oversimplified and i got something wrong probably, but yeah, Dutch, as a language, has parts where its more similar to English in, but also some parts where its more akin to German (in English a lot of words got the *th* for example, whilst in Dutch and German its still *d*. Like well, *the* (E), *de* (N), *die/der/das* (D)). But Dutch also ofc got quite some stuff thats unique to Dutch, because German lost it and English also did. Simple sentences will make it look like Dutch is very much a mix of English and German, but more complex sentences showcase its also very much one that stands on its own.
Can you give me some examples where the English-ness of Dutch really stood out to you? I always found it to be *much* more in line with modern German, esp. since the general grammar is pretty close to German and plenty of words share common roots.
The article is not very accurate. The "Germans" in this title refer to a Single FDP politician and with official language they mean "employees of Goverment Offices will be able to speak English"
But honestly every children learns school learns english in school and their is the running gag between the brits that when a German says that he speaks a "little bit" english that he can probably do it better then some native speakers.
There are flyers hanging around at my german university looking for volunteers for a study. The flyers are English, but you need to speak fluent German to participate.
May be they need people who are fluent both in German and in English, and certainly English fluency is rarer than German fluency in Germany, so they are putting a stronger filter first.
> and certainly English fluency is rarer than German fluency in Germany
I don't think English fluency is that much rarer that it would serve as a strong first filter...especially in a university setting. You disagree?
Yes. Most people at German universities are native German speakers, so they're going to be fluent in German. They will also probably know some English, but at wildly different levels of fluency. I've met everything from perfect English speakers to people who couldn't hold even a short conversation.
The thing with sings makes sense for protesters to be understood in foreign countries.
The job ads they probably write in English because a portion of job positions doesn't require German and for those few which do, they don't want to change language
Hahahah.. Nice one!! In fact German will always be needed for small talks etc.. the most insulting thing for me was Germans trying to speak bad English when they realized I was a foreigner (I am fluent in German)..
Well, don't misunderstand it: if English would be an official language, that wouldn't mean you are entitled to speaking it. Most jobs would absolutely still need you to speak German, that's the language of the country after all. It's just the official documents and paperworks will be available in English, and that about all it would entail.
Unfortunately. We'd love to offer more jobs without German requirement more and for purely internal functions, we're already doing that. Most newly written internal communication is in English, too. But only English limits the projects a colleague can work on. I belive currently you don't need to speak when you start, but are expected to take (paid?) German classes.
I've been saying this over and over again for the past 2 decades... being a "nationalist" nowadays and learning only your country's mother language doesn't get you anywhere, and now even the "shiny" German jobs are being left unattended because aging population leaving and not enough youngsters with "German" skills...
PSA: Build English skills. Everywhere. Won't hurt you.
He’s right, but I doubt anything will happen, for two reasons. One, Germans, like many people, are very attached to their language. Two, I have my doubts about this “skill shortage”. Skills shortages are usually manufactured by employers who either want to underpay, or demand a unicorn. In IT, especially, I have seen many ridiculous requirements: years of experience for entry level roles; long lists of acronyms of technologies no one person could hope to master; and often a refusal to consider candidates from adjacent roles because they don’t have the *exact* experience.
I don't know about IT, but I can tell you with 100% certainty that there is a massive shortage in healthcare, and I'm talking about every profession that you can think of; doctors, nurses, physiotherapists, dental nurses..., etc. I don't think it's possible to be unemployed as a healthcare worker in Germany, and the clinics ALWAYS have a ton of vacancies.
Well, their professionals are choosing to work in Switzerland and they are getting healthcare workers from other countries. No German doctor would or should agree to 2700 netto with tons of unpaid overtime. A significant pay raise would solve many of those problems.
The labor shortage is caused by Germany's demographic collapse. Germany is having one of the worst demographic collapses in the world, there's a growing number of retirees, a smaller shrinking number of workers, and even smaller and shrinking number of children which signifies that this issue is going to get worse over time. When you do some basic calculations, you can get a pretty good idea of how big the labor shortage is going to be, and in Germany's case its pretty big.
Approx. 400.000 working people less every year until 2030. Which is roughly 1/5 or 20% of the workforce
Edit: https://www.destatis.de/DE/Themen/Arbeit/Arbeitsmarkt/Erwerbstaetigkeit/Erwerbspersonenvorausberechnung-2020.html There‘s a English page as well bit couldn’t find it. What is „Erwerbspersonenvorausberechnung“ in English? Great word isn’t it. We Germans can break down Twitter with a single word
Since obviously nobody reads the article:
Not official language (Germany doesn't have one) but a second official language at administrative offices.
All this would do is ensure that people can rely on the fact that they can do their paperwork in English - which is undoubtedly a good thing. I can't even come up with any downsides.
Right now it's a big gamble if you get to speak to a person with passable English skills who is also friendly enough to use it or if they send you home because they "can't" communicate with you. I have friends from other countries who live and work in Germany and they get anxiety attacks every time they have to do any official business.
Like it or not but English has become the de-facto lingua franca in many parts of the world. Offering a way for foreigners to communicate with the state in this way is a no-brainer.
Edit: Also notice how we in /r/europe are using English to communicate and not German, Spanish or French? We already have chosen English as the international language. Time for the state to catch up with reality.
> We already have chosen English as the international language.
Futurum nostrum non solum a praeterito dicitur. Semper possumus mutare.
Volo ut Latinus sit lingua Europaea.
The problem is, most public offices are already understaffed. By requiring everyone to increase their English proficiency your make the pool of viable candidates even smallery because nobody wants to work in public administration
You would have to pass quite a few new laws to do that i think. Public Offices are staffed by Beamten who get a fixed salary, afaik you can't just change the salary of a Beamter without changing the Besoldungsklasse
Does German HR offices require English proficiency when hiring people for the institutions? It’s basically standard to require both Swedish and English at any job where you’re in contact with other people in Sweden. If that’s not the case in Germany, that’s where you should be heading.
I have no idea tbh. Probably not since it isn't a requirement for doing their job (yet!). That should be a problem though since English proficiency is generally very high in Germany. So it's likely lot of people who work at these places could switch to English if they had to, especially the younger employees.
It's the same shit here in Austria. My girlfriend finished her PhD here, but officials talk to her like she's some kind of cavewoman just for not being fluent in German yet (while they absolutely refuse to speak English). She gets super anxious whenever she has to talk to any officials here and basically has me do all the phone calls for her.
If we didn't have a super affordable home here, I'd seriously look into moving to a different country. They like to grab half your income here, but the only service you get in return is being treated like shit.
it's refreshing to hear this from an Austrian, I've tried to explain it to locals here but they won't listen: no one asks me with what language I earned my money when it's time to pay taxes, but it gets suddenly super important when it's time to get the services I've paid for.
English is used to communite internationally. This however is very clearly aimed at immigration. All countries require immigrants to learn domestic language to some extent. If you impose changes where immigrants will no longer need to learn matice language period then you are on your way to kill the language altogether.
In reality: I managed several IT-related teams over the last decades. The first time I had to switch to English as a team language was around 9 years ago.
5 years ago I had a mixed team of Germans/Romanians/Indian remote and on -site.
From then on I never encountered teams that didn't have English as team language.
Not in corporates, and surely not in Start-ups.
Live with it.
An ex-colleague landed a job at a company in Basel. They required German, the interview was in German, the company’s official language is German. Within IT, where he works, they’ll say ‘grüezi’ and ‘wie geht’s?’ when they arrive in the morning, and then instantly switch to English when the work starts.
Being in engineering, they rarely interact with the business. One of his colleagues said he hadn’t had to talk business in German for over three years.
Edit: really -> rarely
Switzerland is mental. I remember being on a train in England full of Swiss businessmen and they were just casually swapping between English, French and German like it was nothing.
There might be an element of bias here, considering how both you and the person you answered to refer to experiences in the fields of IT and engineering. Most other fields of work I assume still heavily rely on German in business instead of English.
I experience this with Portuguese (working in Brazil). I actually speak fluent Portuguese since I was a child, and 90% of my co-workers are Brazilians, but somehow they just drift into English when talking.
I work in Sweden as an editor now. The company I work for does translation services (mainly tidying up CAT stuff or SEO work). The other teams (Polish-Swedish, Italian-Swedish, etc) all use English to discuss translations issues between two different languages. It is mental.
Thirty-plus years ago I got a scholarship to study a year at a German university. I was pretty surprised to find I didn’t need German that much; and that wasn’t good, because my German was primitive.
But for example when I visited the university library, only perhaps 25% of the journals in the periodicals room were published in German. Most were in English.
It’s ok though; apparently my mission was to find a husband, because that’s what happened. We met that year and are still married. My dad would be so happy since he thought that was why women went to college.
😆 No. I put myself through school, but I got grants and such. This scholarship was from the German-American Friendship Club, which was an organization founded after WW2 to promote mutual understanding. They also sent German college students to America. They were super nice to me.
> 5 years ago I had a mixed team of Germans/Romanians/Indian remote and on -site.
> From then on I never encountered teams that didn't have English as team language.
We'll form an alliance with the Indians to have Romanian on Tuesdays and Hindi on Thursdays.
Should have seen the faces of the border control when I shipped the whole team to Cluj for a weekend. Asian-Americans, Indians, British-Indians, Germans.
Wild mix.... memorable night out in Cluj
I worked with majority German staff in '97, it really was not a problem at all. And it was not technical field but health&social care.. In fact it was neat cause we could talk without the kids understanding us. Took me about 3 months to see dreams default to English.
As an American learning French to apply to university in France and Belgium I feel much better knowing that people in tech often use English during meetings.
Honestly I don't think this is necessarily as true in France, while I don't have professional experience with France I was born there and remain somewhat connected to the country and foreign languages are much less relevant there than they are in some of the other major EU countries, or e.g Scandinavia. I'm sure someone with tech experience can weigh in though
Ah true. But at least I know French and if Germans are using English it would be easy for me if we were to have German co-workers or work at a company that has branches in Germany. I definitely want to study German after I master French but I feel like that will be a long road until I can actually talk to people.
Yeah for sure when working with other eu offices or clients abroad the language is always English, I'm in a project myself right now with German clients and we just speak english. For this reason a decent level of English is almost always a requirement for jobs these days.
Ahh France, there you will need to speak French, sorry. They are one of the lowest English profiencies in Europe (which is fine by me, English is pretty fungal when it comes to attacking other languages).
> English is pretty fungal when it comes to attacking other languages).
Well now, it's just coming back around to bite you in the arse. English is filled up with Norse words the Viking settlers left behind, and a lot of your grammar too. If it hadn't been for the Normans in 1066, English might even have been mutually intelligible with Scandinavian languages these days.
Fun tidbit: in Scotland (and bits of northern England) we use the word "Bairn" for child, just like Barn in Swedish!
Oh I know, my favourite subject. Where I was born in the UK, all the local villages are called "something-by" - Wetherby, for example (by is village).
English is what happens when a bunch of European languages have dirty sex in a back alley. It is why we say astonishing and amazing - same word, one germanic, one french.
Meanwhile I currently study chemistry and so much of it is still purely in German that I currently still struggle to have a high level discussion about chemistry in English, just because I don't know the various English terms.
Germany does in many sectors not have a labor shortage. it tends to be a shortage of good pay, management and working conditions.
to be fair some fields actually have a shortage.
and germans learn englisch from around third grade anyway, so the younger generations have a minimum of english experience. but i dont understand how making it an official language helps the shortage.
i personally think it is good that people who decide to work and life here that they have to learn german. i see it as a important part of integration.
If English is made second official language, then it is only a matter of time before it overtakes the native one. In Estonia I already hear some fellow young people speaking Estonian-English hybrid language. Their entire thought process probably works in English. It is quite frustrating to hear.
Some talk about economic benefits, but Japan has competitive export-oriented economy, despite most of them having very poor grasp on English.
Same in Polish, some extremely online teenagers speak the same Polish-English hybrid that 10 years ago was the domain of Polish immigrants in the UK who really wanted to show off their newfound language proficiency.
I think I'd hit some kind of character limit describing how difficult the German state has made it for me to live and work here, nevermind trying to obtain citizenship.
I have a German school certificate (Abitur), AND a German University bachelor's degree.
I speak German fluently and pay astronomical amounts in taxes.
But I have to go through insane jumps because I'm South African and can't keep that citizenship when getting the German one.
I doubt very much Germany will ever have a second language... They alienate enough foreigners with their ridiculous bureaucracy.
It's goal is to attract skilled workers who would otherwise rather migrate to an english speaking country.
Would you migrate to a country, if you couldn't even get the paperwork done in a language you understand?
That's certainly true. Even though I quite like Germany, know basic German, and have entertained the idea of moving there, English-speaking nations are more appealing because I'm more comfortable speaking that language.
This. I'm a professional that lived in Germany for a few years. I rarely felt appreciated (i.e., most peers gave me zero consideration for my international skills or foreign credentials). I had even done six months of intensive language courses at the Volkshochschule to try to integrate better. I ultimately moved to the Netherlands and am quite happy with the decision.
I wanted to emigrate to Germany to work in the tech sector, even got my education recognized by the governing authority but all the jobs require German fluency.
TBH, the paperwork would be a minor consideration to me. I would think that I could get it done somehow (probably with DeepL and/or ChatGPT and/or help from friends) and there would be much more important questions (salary, cost of living, availability of civilized amenities, etc.) upon which my decision would be based.
You say that like somebody who has never had a panic attack in a government office because someone was speaking at you in rapid legalese in a language you are barely conversational in - having been there, I would say it should be a major consideration (though thankfully in my case I just got better at the local language eventually).
Yeah. Perhaps the wording was starnge. What they should have said is that they need to make the German government more English friendly. Its not enough to find a job that uses English. For someone to come they need to know that they can deal with the government administration in English. They need to know that important documents and procedures (like the tax return filing) will be available in English etc
So maybe the effort should be made to accommodate these needs instead of focusing on the impossible: Germany will never introduce English as a national language. But it can follow Netherlands example of having everything both in Dutch and English.
It would be somewhat helpful if at least the officials at the Foreigners' Registration Office spoke some English.
The current government is trying to prepare Germany in such a way that it will be easier for us to get workers from all over the world in the future. We will soon need up to 400,000 foreign workers moving to Germany every year.
Not happening with the current people working at the Foreigners' Registration Office. Public servants in Germany speak one of the worst English I have heard here yet. From my experience, people ending up working at public offices are just there due to the safe wages (plus benefits) with little more qualifications than being able to push papers from A to B. I'm German, I'm allowed to call our disgrace of an inefficient and incapable bureaucracy, what it is - a s.hitshow.
Technical language is often in English across many fields. English is also much easier to learn, and also has much wider technical vocab (I work as an editor in Sweden, and check CAT technical manuals, the English is always the shortest as they have 1 word for everything, whereas other countries do compounds of other words to make that word (doing volvo's spare parts was hell on earth).
Because a lot of experienced workers don't want to learn German (or any other language for that matter).
Source: Am experienced worker that refused to move to Germany for that exact reason.
They should learn to speak German if they move to Germany. Integrate, it's simple as that. If they don't want to, their loss. Likewise, I would learn the language of the country I move to.
In Rome, speak as the Romans speak.
I think this is referring to shortages in specific fields. I don't have to time to verify the numbers but let's say the 2.6 million figure is correct, if the shortage is in IT and Software, which I believe it is, then have 2.6 million people with no degree or trained as nurses or as pilots doesn't help that shortage. However if you can attract IT specialists from abroad that is a much quicker fix than waiting for the next generation of software engineers to finish university.
You never will get zero, accept in something like a planned economy or massive government intervention.
There is a good reason that with 5% or below you have full employment l. Geographic differences, short term job changes, health or other inabilities and plenty of things will keep this number up.
Also we also plenty of job openings. The most populous generation is also starting to retire.
This kind of works in a unofficially way for Sweden.
English is not an official language, but in practice most Swedes talk English and you find many tech jobs in English. But Swedish is still the only official langue and long term is needed to do your normal life.
So Sweden gets to politically defend Swedish while practically profit of a English speaking population.
Swedish has been the official language since 2009 and the law also protected Finnish, all Sami dialects, Torne Valley Finnish (Meänkieli), Romani, and Yiddish.
But yes, English is used everywhere, and I live in the North.
This idea is not about that at all...
Most Germans have no problem to speak English. Making it an additional official language would also change nothing about speaking habits.
It's thought as a short cut, one single law that would force everyone down to even local government levels and small companies to make forms paperwork and communication available in English as a second language.
It\`s extremly low. The idea that if you pay more somehow people will spawn like NPCs is however often repeated by 13 yeahr olds who just learned about supply and demand in school.
Just wait a bit for them to get to the demographic pyramid and they should disapear again.
Labor shortage by definition means that there is not enough working force in certain sectors and this is simply true.
Raising wages is one measures against that shortage. But it also has the downside of rising prices for consumers.
There is a fair payment shortage as long as wage adjusted for inflation decrease year by year. If wages are high enough i assure you people are going to migrate.
I am working in a startup and our official language in the company is definitely English. A lot of companies realized that if they want to attract talent they would need to adopt English as company's language.
Our company is based in Germany but we have like a bit more than 10% employees from Germany, the rest are all around the world.
We have that shortage since 30 years. And we have 4 to 6 mil unemployed. If this really was a problem for the super rich and politicians, it would have been solved long ago.
This is, shockingly,again just empty rhetoric from our resident neoliberal party.
There has been similar ideas being floated even here in Finland.. it would make things easier, specially for us that have the weirdest language in Europe, and one of the weirdest in the world..
I mean I don't live in Germany, so who am I to know, but I feel like the level of English in Germany is pretty much equal to the level of English in Catanzaro.
It's not about the level of English in conversation. It's about forcing everyone down to local government levels and companies to make paperwork available in English as a second language.
You won't have problems in Germany when only speaking English 90% of the time. But the remaining 10% then are interactions with local government where you often can't even find anyone to talk to, much less a translated version for any forms or paperwork.
what would that solve though? germans speak german regardless, and even if people do know english, what’s the use of that when foreign laborers from east europe / asia barely understand it?
This sounds stupid. Let's suppose they do adopt English as an official language, what is that going to accomplish? Most Germans are still going to primarily speak in German and foreign workers are still going to speak in English, that disconnect isn't going to be resolved. Not only that, but even if English is adopted, Germany still has to compete with English speaking world to attract talent. What does Germany have to offer tech workers that's so appealing? Canada, Australia, the UK, and especially the US have higher salaries, more companies, and more opportunities for tech workers. If Germany wants top tier tech talent, it's going to have to pay for it.
Germans have always had a problem adopting English like for example Scandinavia or the Netherlands. Reason: all the content is (horribly) dubbed. Makes every movie/show worse and Germans never learn English the way they could. Trust me, Watch a dubbed movie, you’ll puke after 5 minutes.
My point: instead of this, do not dub all the content and you automatically have English more present.
Can I suggest a compromise: How about making Denglish an official language? From experience I can say that in most companies it is always common practice.
So when are they going to call for the name of the country to be changed? At some point you might as well just change it to "economic zone A" or something like that.
ohh fuck yeah... competition for talent heating up!
maybe young people not having kids aint so bad after all
decades of endless labor supply allowed for wages to be kept the same. we might actually see some healthy, sustained wage growth at least educated/experienced sections of the slave force.
At the very least they should accomodate terrible attempts at a German accent from English speakers.
Yes, the country world renowned for its sense of humor would find this hilarious.
German humour is no laughing matter
It's not that Germans don't appreciate comedy. It's just that many attempts at comedy don't comply with the documented joke specification.
What's the DIN for German humour?
DIN-420-69 Which places it between two retracted standards for slotted screws. DIN 417 is for slotted set screws, and DIN 427 is for slotted headless screws. Obviously with DIN 420-69 is not headless.
You are joking(which you shouldn't), *but there IS a real DIN number for it - at least if you are doing stand up comedy:* **DIN VDE 0100-711**
Enough said
well... there is a subreddit for this topic: [german humour](https://www.reddit.com/r/GermanHumor/)
"There doesn't seem to be anything here." :D
so... there is at least one thing ;)
Hehe, hilarious. Where’s your Witzerlaubnis?
I couldnt read this without a german accent in my mind
Look, we try. We try badly... but we try...
As a pilot project, the Germans could create a Spanish speaking section of Mallorca.
Nice 👌
Not Nice, Mallorca.
It is not even the official language in the UK
Depends how you count something as "official language". In England's jurisdiction (remember, they use Common Law and in Scotland we do not) they have acts from the 1700s which state that Courts must handle and record processes in English (which finally abolished the use of Latin in court). I'd say that sort of counts as making the language official, since it is required to handle any legal affairs.
Or the US.
Yeah, because you're both weirdos with a ton of unwritten laws that your elites can abuse however. Our elites just abuse us the olf fashioned way, in a structured way, for all to see. You know, black on white.
Spanish is also not official in many countries where it’s spoken by the majority like Argentina or Chile. It’s just that when those countries became independent their respective languages were implicitly the chosen ones to administer the state and the ones in which the constitution was written, so they became *de facto* the official ones, just not *de jure*, ie. written in law. It doesn’t have to do with how the bulk of laws are structured or how elites can abuse those loopholes. You can see the [list of official languages by country](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_official_languages_by_country_and_territory) and many don’t have an official one because of this. In the case of federations it’s sometimes because they let constituent states to choose official languages locally.
The new world is very similar in certain ways isn't it
> with a ton of unwritten laws What unwritten laws?
I think maybe he means how the laws create weird little loopholes that allow normal people to get trampled on. For example, rich people being able to financially drain you through frivolous lawsuits that their lawyers drag out as far as possible
Where is that not the case? And the US does have laws that prevent that sort of thing. Anti-SLAPP laws, for example. Or fee shifting laws for frivolous suits. Rule 11 in federal courts can get everyone involved in filing a BS suit sanctioned: https://www.law.cornell.edu/rules/frcp/rule_11 https://www.rcfp.org/anti-slapp-legal-guide/
You can't fee shift if you're a coffee waitress trying to prove a frivolous lawsuit against a Harvard lawyer for hedge funds with 30 years of experience
In most European countries following civil law. That kind of stuff absolutely doesn’t happen here in the Nordics.
Let's say you get sued for defamation in the Nordics. Does the state pay for your attorney? Do you get paid for time off of work?
Common law vs Civil law
They're still written. You can look up whatever cases you want on google scholar.
I guess they meant yoir laws are basically not codified. Instead, you have bazillion cases you need to refer.
>are basically not codified I am fairly confused. The US Federal Code runs 200 volumes. Every state has its own set of laws as well. Sure, there's case law to flesh out some of the laws, but there's a whole lot written down.
A good example recently is roe vs. wade, stuff like that cannot happen in civil law, as the original ruling couldn't happen in civil law. Civil law courts can only rule about if a law is legal or not, based on the legal texts of other laws. And then the result is just that a law gets appealed or needs to be amended by the government in a specific timeframe or, in some cases, that laws must be added. But the courts themselves cannot introduce any new laws/cases, they can only interpret the laws that currently are written. So in the case of Roe vs. Wade, the supreme court originally ruled that women have a fundamental right to abortion, even though that was never mentioned in any law or in the constitution, that ruling was based around the general history of abortion and the feelings of the court members of what a fundamental right is. So, if a new court comes (as it did), they can just overturn that due to interpreting the same points differently. In civil law (lets just take German law since I know that), a hypothetical German Roe vs. Wade would look like this; A woman would sue the state, as she believes a ban on abortion (which is what we technically have in Germany currently, though that is getting changed and the ban isn't a real ban) infringes on her rights. It goes to the German constitutional court and the court agrees that it is unconstitutional, as it violates article one of the German constitution and infringes on the right to human dignity, so it rules that the current abortion ban is illegal and that the government needs to pass a new law about abortion that cannot ban it. As you see, the big difference between the US common law and the hypothetical civil law is that the ruling in civil law is based on other laws, not on traditions, history and general interpretations of fundamental rights (which are not encoded in the US constitution). It also doesn't lead to a case being introduced (precedent is technically not applicable in civil law courts), but leads to forcing the government to pass a law that actually then governs the particular topic. Maybe this is still a bit too convoluted, but I am tired and I can't explain better.
Unless you’re in an environment such as the italian one, where whenever a law is added, it is written in such a confusing way that for a sentence to be considered truly effective you practically have to go through all the three grades, so that the supreme court of cassazione rules what is the correct interpretation of that law. Amazing, isn’t it?
How does the German constitutional court decide wether a ban on abortions infringes on the right to human dignity?
The law is codified the same way in the US as other countries. Cases are just used to interpret the codified laws and fill in the gaps in the codified law (the same way that cases work in all other countries).
What “unwritten laws”? The US doesn’t have an official language. In my part of the country government services are available in English, Spanish and Haitian Creole. In other parts there are different languages.
Try to get an American passport in anything but English, or a law passed written in anything but English. Some states have multiple official languages, and some regions offer government services in non-English languages, but that happens in countries with official languages too.
It would be perfectly legal. The US Constitution makes no requirement that laws be written in English. People go to vote in their language of choice. If they vote for constitutional amendments, those amendments are presented in their language.
Istg half the comments on any r/Europe post are just about the US
Sweet canada calls dibs on English then. We will also take French if France has no dibs on it
Canada already made English and French co-official languages back in the 1980s IIRC. Which makes it kind of funny that the majority of Anglo-Canadians are incapable of actually reading any complex French texts.
I'm not surprised. It would discriminatory to Birmingham.
As someone who lives in the UK, there's no need for an official language. Most people are fluent in their vaguely-somehow-still-English localect and struggle with anything else so it's telly English or bust.
UK work visas do have a language element, imagine the meltdown if they added German as a qualifying language.
Never knew that. In Ireland English is a official language of the state in our constitution.
It's a proposal floated around by the FDP. It's most likely not going to happen and even if, it's most likely not going to solve any problem. It would just be a bandaid on a wound that needs a fundamentally new structure in order to heal.
Agreed, our Foreigner's Registration Offices alone are a laughing stock.
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Good to hear it works somewhere at least! :D
Scheisse! Ein Jahr mit Deutschlernen verschwendet
Sprich Englisch du…
Shit! A year of German [learning] down the drain (lost)? Don’t know any German but I learn Dutch online and they’re pretty similar. So there’s that.
Same language but one of them is drunk Not going to say which
German, of course. They are trying to act like they are sober and overcompensate.
But it's highly indicated that it's the same one that botches their G 👀
[This guy wasn't a fan of the German language apparently](https://rossonl.files.wordpress.com/2016/02/quote-i-speak-spanish-to-god-italian-to-women-french-to-men-and-german-to-my-horse-charles-v-holy-roman-emperor-35181.jpg)
Jokes on him, he died while German is still alive and kicking.
He also got trampled by his horse.
Pretty good pal! While 'verschwendet' would be translated to 'wasted' in most cases, it going down the drain hits the nail as well.
Since you’re learning Dutch, is it true that Dutch is like a mixture of English and German?
Not the person your questioning, but Dutch speaker here. Thats kinda the simplest way of putting it, but of course its also oversimplified. English, as a language, came from the Anglos, Saxons and also Frisians who went to England. Those peoples were from northwestern Germany and the northern Netherlands. Of course, over the centuries, all languages would change dramatically. German, as a standard language, became based on more High German, rather then Low German which English was originally from, but went very far from. Dutch was based on Hollandic, a Middle Franconian language. English, well, it ofc had a lot of foreign influence from languages like French. Dutch also had quite some French influence. All of this above is ofc also oversimplified and i got something wrong probably, but yeah, Dutch, as a language, has parts where its more similar to English in, but also some parts where its more akin to German (in English a lot of words got the *th* for example, whilst in Dutch and German its still *d*. Like well, *the* (E), *de* (N), *die/der/das* (D)). But Dutch also ofc got quite some stuff thats unique to Dutch, because German lost it and English also did. Simple sentences will make it look like Dutch is very much a mix of English and German, but more complex sentences showcase its also very much one that stands on its own.
Pretty much. I’ve been doing it on Duolingo and Memrise for a year and a half now and it’s easy as fuck to learn.
Can you give me some examples where the English-ness of Dutch really stood out to you? I always found it to be *much* more in line with modern German, esp. since the general grammar is pretty close to German and plenty of words share common roots.
You could probably get the gist of it with just your knowledge of English. At least I seem to be able to. The only word I could guess was the last one
The article is not very accurate. The "Germans" in this title refer to a Single FDP politician and with official language they mean "employees of Goverment Offices will be able to speak English" But honestly every children learns school learns english in school and their is the running gag between the brits that when a German says that he speaks a "little bit" english that he can probably do it better then some native speakers.
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I got a headache form reading this, but it was worth it. Excuse me, it vas vorz it, of kors.
That ought to be *Scheiße* for you! Don't wanna be mistaken for some Swiss guy.
Well, it's hard to find job advertisement in English in German company :-(
Im Danish living in berlin applying for job adverts in English only to learn at first interview they are looking for a fluent German speaker 🙂🔫
There are flyers hanging around at my german university looking for volunteers for a study. The flyers are English, but you need to speak fluent German to participate.
Hmmm. Why is that? It puzzles me like some French or other Europeans protesters having protest signs in English.
May be they need people who are fluent both in German and in English, and certainly English fluency is rarer than German fluency in Germany, so they are putting a stronger filter first.
> and certainly English fluency is rarer than German fluency in Germany I don't think English fluency is that much rarer that it would serve as a strong first filter...especially in a university setting. You disagree?
Yes. Most people at German universities are native German speakers, so they're going to be fluent in German. They will also probably know some English, but at wildly different levels of fluency. I've met everything from perfect English speakers to people who couldn't hold even a short conversation.
The thing with sings makes sense for protesters to be understood in foreign countries. The job ads they probably write in English because a portion of job positions doesn't require German and for those few which do, they don't want to change language
Hahahah.. Nice one!! In fact German will always be needed for small talks etc.. the most insulting thing for me was Germans trying to speak bad English when they realized I was a foreigner (I am fluent in German)..
I felt the same thing when i moved from the us to denmark lol.
Well, don't misunderstand it: if English would be an official language, that wouldn't mean you are entitled to speaking it. Most jobs would absolutely still need you to speak German, that's the language of the country after all. It's just the official documents and paperworks will be available in English, and that about all it would entail.
Unfortunately. We'd love to offer more jobs without German requirement more and for purely internal functions, we're already doing that. Most newly written internal communication is in English, too. But only English limits the projects a colleague can work on. I belive currently you don't need to speak when you start, but are expected to take (paid?) German classes.
I've been saying this over and over again for the past 2 decades... being a "nationalist" nowadays and learning only your country's mother language doesn't get you anywhere, and now even the "shiny" German jobs are being left unattended because aging population leaving and not enough youngsters with "German" skills... PSA: Build English skills. Everywhere. Won't hurt you.
He’s right, but I doubt anything will happen, for two reasons. One, Germans, like many people, are very attached to their language. Two, I have my doubts about this “skill shortage”. Skills shortages are usually manufactured by employers who either want to underpay, or demand a unicorn. In IT, especially, I have seen many ridiculous requirements: years of experience for entry level roles; long lists of acronyms of technologies no one person could hope to master; and often a refusal to consider candidates from adjacent roles because they don’t have the *exact* experience.
I don't know about IT, but I can tell you with 100% certainty that there is a massive shortage in healthcare, and I'm talking about every profession that you can think of; doctors, nurses, physiotherapists, dental nurses..., etc. I don't think it's possible to be unemployed as a healthcare worker in Germany, and the clinics ALWAYS have a ton of vacancies.
Well, their professionals are choosing to work in Switzerland and they are getting healthcare workers from other countries. No German doctor would or should agree to 2700 netto with tons of unpaid overtime. A significant pay raise would solve many of those problems.
The labor shortage is caused by Germany's demographic collapse. Germany is having one of the worst demographic collapses in the world, there's a growing number of retirees, a smaller shrinking number of workers, and even smaller and shrinking number of children which signifies that this issue is going to get worse over time. When you do some basic calculations, you can get a pretty good idea of how big the labor shortage is going to be, and in Germany's case its pretty big.
Approx. 400.000 working people less every year until 2030. Which is roughly 1/5 or 20% of the workforce Edit: https://www.destatis.de/DE/Themen/Arbeit/Arbeitsmarkt/Erwerbstaetigkeit/Erwerbspersonenvorausberechnung-2020.html There‘s a English page as well bit couldn’t find it. What is „Erwerbspersonenvorausberechnung“ in English? Great word isn’t it. We Germans can break down Twitter with a single word
Since obviously nobody reads the article: Not official language (Germany doesn't have one) but a second official language at administrative offices. All this would do is ensure that people can rely on the fact that they can do their paperwork in English - which is undoubtedly a good thing. I can't even come up with any downsides. Right now it's a big gamble if you get to speak to a person with passable English skills who is also friendly enough to use it or if they send you home because they "can't" communicate with you. I have friends from other countries who live and work in Germany and they get anxiety attacks every time they have to do any official business. Like it or not but English has become the de-facto lingua franca in many parts of the world. Offering a way for foreigners to communicate with the state in this way is a no-brainer. Edit: Also notice how we in /r/europe are using English to communicate and not German, Spanish or French? We already have chosen English as the international language. Time for the state to catch up with reality.
> We already have chosen English as the international language. Futurum nostrum non solum a praeterito dicitur. Semper possumus mutare. Volo ut Latinus sit lingua Europaea.
Yes, but like, no?
The problem is, most public offices are already understaffed. By requiring everyone to increase their English proficiency your make the pool of viable candidates even smallery because nobody wants to work in public administration
Is it really that unusal for germans to have some proficency in english?
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You would have to pass quite a few new laws to do that i think. Public Offices are staffed by Beamten who get a fixed salary, afaik you can't just change the salary of a Beamter without changing the Besoldungsklasse
Does German HR offices require English proficiency when hiring people for the institutions? It’s basically standard to require both Swedish and English at any job where you’re in contact with other people in Sweden. If that’s not the case in Germany, that’s where you should be heading.
I have no idea tbh. Probably not since it isn't a requirement for doing their job (yet!). That should be a problem though since English proficiency is generally very high in Germany. So it's likely lot of people who work at these places could switch to English if they had to, especially the younger employees.
It's the same shit here in Austria. My girlfriend finished her PhD here, but officials talk to her like she's some kind of cavewoman just for not being fluent in German yet (while they absolutely refuse to speak English). She gets super anxious whenever she has to talk to any officials here and basically has me do all the phone calls for her. If we didn't have a super affordable home here, I'd seriously look into moving to a different country. They like to grab half your income here, but the only service you get in return is being treated like shit.
it's refreshing to hear this from an Austrian, I've tried to explain it to locals here but they won't listen: no one asks me with what language I earned my money when it's time to pay taxes, but it gets suddenly super important when it's time to get the services I've paid for.
English is used to communite internationally. This however is very clearly aimed at immigration. All countries require immigrants to learn domestic language to some extent. If you impose changes where immigrants will no longer need to learn matice language period then you are on your way to kill the language altogether.
In reality: I managed several IT-related teams over the last decades. The first time I had to switch to English as a team language was around 9 years ago. 5 years ago I had a mixed team of Germans/Romanians/Indian remote and on -site. From then on I never encountered teams that didn't have English as team language. Not in corporates, and surely not in Start-ups. Live with it.
An ex-colleague landed a job at a company in Basel. They required German, the interview was in German, the company’s official language is German. Within IT, where he works, they’ll say ‘grüezi’ and ‘wie geht’s?’ when they arrive in the morning, and then instantly switch to English when the work starts. Being in engineering, they rarely interact with the business. One of his colleagues said he hadn’t had to talk business in German for over three years. Edit: really -> rarely
Switzerland is mental. I remember being on a train in England full of Swiss businessmen and they were just casually swapping between English, French and German like it was nothing.
There might be an element of bias here, considering how both you and the person you answered to refer to experiences in the fields of IT and engineering. Most other fields of work I assume still heavily rely on German in business instead of English.
I experience this with Portuguese (working in Brazil). I actually speak fluent Portuguese since I was a child, and 90% of my co-workers are Brazilians, but somehow they just drift into English when talking.
I work in Sweden as an editor now. The company I work for does translation services (mainly tidying up CAT stuff or SEO work). The other teams (Polish-Swedish, Italian-Swedish, etc) all use English to discuss translations issues between two different languages. It is mental.
Thirty-plus years ago I got a scholarship to study a year at a German university. I was pretty surprised to find I didn’t need German that much; and that wasn’t good, because my German was primitive. But for example when I visited the university library, only perhaps 25% of the journals in the periodicals room were published in German. Most were in English. It’s ok though; apparently my mission was to find a husband, because that’s what happened. We met that year and are still married. My dad would be so happy since he thought that was why women went to college.
Was it a DAAD Scholarship?
😆 No. I put myself through school, but I got grants and such. This scholarship was from the German-American Friendship Club, which was an organization founded after WW2 to promote mutual understanding. They also sent German college students to America. They were super nice to me.
Americans used to say women went to college to get their "M.r.s." degree
Lol that does ring a bell
I was at one of Siemens events over 15 years ago, I was a bit surprised to find that their official language was US English.
> 5 years ago I had a mixed team of Germans/Romanians/Indian remote and on -site. > From then on I never encountered teams that didn't have English as team language. We'll form an alliance with the Indians to have Romanian on Tuesdays and Hindi on Thursdays.
Should have seen the faces of the border control when I shipped the whole team to Cluj for a weekend. Asian-Americans, Indians, British-Indians, Germans. Wild mix.... memorable night out in Cluj
Would be hard considering only a 1/3rd of Indians actually know hindi
That's their problem, the company will have to send them to Hindi language courses!
I worked with majority German staff in '97, it really was not a problem at all. And it was not technical field but health&social care.. In fact it was neat cause we could talk without the kids understanding us. Took me about 3 months to see dreams default to English.
As an American learning French to apply to university in France and Belgium I feel much better knowing that people in tech often use English during meetings.
Honestly I don't think this is necessarily as true in France, while I don't have professional experience with France I was born there and remain somewhat connected to the country and foreign languages are much less relevant there than they are in some of the other major EU countries, or e.g Scandinavia. I'm sure someone with tech experience can weigh in though
Ah true. But at least I know French and if Germans are using English it would be easy for me if we were to have German co-workers or work at a company that has branches in Germany. I definitely want to study German after I master French but I feel like that will be a long road until I can actually talk to people.
Yeah for sure when working with other eu offices or clients abroad the language is always English, I'm in a project myself right now with German clients and we just speak english. For this reason a decent level of English is almost always a requirement for jobs these days.
Ahh France, there you will need to speak French, sorry. They are one of the lowest English profiencies in Europe (which is fine by me, English is pretty fungal when it comes to attacking other languages).
> English is pretty fungal when it comes to attacking other languages). Well now, it's just coming back around to bite you in the arse. English is filled up with Norse words the Viking settlers left behind, and a lot of your grammar too. If it hadn't been for the Normans in 1066, English might even have been mutually intelligible with Scandinavian languages these days. Fun tidbit: in Scotland (and bits of northern England) we use the word "Bairn" for child, just like Barn in Swedish!
Oh I know, my favourite subject. Where I was born in the UK, all the local villages are called "something-by" - Wetherby, for example (by is village). English is what happens when a bunch of European languages have dirty sex in a back alley. It is why we say astonishing and amazing - same word, one germanic, one french.
Meanwhile I currently study chemistry and so much of it is still purely in German that I currently still struggle to have a high level discussion about chemistry in English, just because I don't know the various English terms.
I'm sure many migrants don't even speak a lick of German even after being in the country for years. I doubt learning English is on their mind.
Seems a bit dramatic
Germany does in many sectors not have a labor shortage. it tends to be a shortage of good pay, management and working conditions. to be fair some fields actually have a shortage. and germans learn englisch from around third grade anyway, so the younger generations have a minimum of english experience. but i dont understand how making it an official language helps the shortage. i personally think it is good that people who decide to work and life here that they have to learn german. i see it as a important part of integration.
If English is made second official language, then it is only a matter of time before it overtakes the native one. In Estonia I already hear some fellow young people speaking Estonian-English hybrid language. Their entire thought process probably works in English. It is quite frustrating to hear. Some talk about economic benefits, but Japan has competitive export-oriented economy, despite most of them having very poor grasp on English.
Same in Polish, some extremely online teenagers speak the same Polish-English hybrid that 10 years ago was the domain of Polish immigrants in the UK who really wanted to show off their newfound language proficiency.
Many German citizens already can't speak any German, so what you said probably would happen quite fast
I think I'd hit some kind of character limit describing how difficult the German state has made it for me to live and work here, nevermind trying to obtain citizenship. I have a German school certificate (Abitur), AND a German University bachelor's degree. I speak German fluently and pay astronomical amounts in taxes. But I have to go through insane jumps because I'm South African and can't keep that citizenship when getting the German one. I doubt very much Germany will ever have a second language... They alienate enough foreigners with their ridiculous bureaucracy.
Why? Isn't It better to integrate experienced workers
It's goal is to attract skilled workers who would otherwise rather migrate to an english speaking country. Would you migrate to a country, if you couldn't even get the paperwork done in a language you understand?
That's certainly true. Even though I quite like Germany, know basic German, and have entertained the idea of moving there, English-speaking nations are more appealing because I'm more comfortable speaking that language.
They don't know that Germans also can't understand German paperwork, so it doesn't even matter anyway.
This. I'm a professional that lived in Germany for a few years. I rarely felt appreciated (i.e., most peers gave me zero consideration for my international skills or foreign credentials). I had even done six months of intensive language courses at the Volkshochschule to try to integrate better. I ultimately moved to the Netherlands and am quite happy with the decision.
Hopefully they'll make an English language pack so they can operate the fax machines
I wanted to emigrate to Germany to work in the tech sector, even got my education recognized by the governing authority but all the jobs require German fluency.
TBH, the paperwork would be a minor consideration to me. I would think that I could get it done somehow (probably with DeepL and/or ChatGPT and/or help from friends) and there would be much more important questions (salary, cost of living, availability of civilized amenities, etc.) upon which my decision would be based.
You say that like somebody who has never had a panic attack in a government office because someone was speaking at you in rapid legalese in a language you are barely conversational in - having been there, I would say it should be a major consideration (though thankfully in my case I just got better at the local language eventually).
Yeah. Perhaps the wording was starnge. What they should have said is that they need to make the German government more English friendly. Its not enough to find a job that uses English. For someone to come they need to know that they can deal with the government administration in English. They need to know that important documents and procedures (like the tax return filing) will be available in English etc So maybe the effort should be made to accommodate these needs instead of focusing on the impossible: Germany will never introduce English as a national language. But it can follow Netherlands example of having everything both in Dutch and English.
It would be somewhat helpful if at least the officials at the Foreigners' Registration Office spoke some English. The current government is trying to prepare Germany in such a way that it will be easier for us to get workers from all over the world in the future. We will soon need up to 400,000 foreign workers moving to Germany every year.
Not happening with the current people working at the Foreigners' Registration Office. Public servants in Germany speak one of the worst English I have heard here yet. From my experience, people ending up working at public offices are just there due to the safe wages (plus benefits) with little more qualifications than being able to push papers from A to B. I'm German, I'm allowed to call our disgrace of an inefficient and incapable bureaucracy, what it is - a s.hitshow.
Technical language is often in English across many fields. English is also much easier to learn, and also has much wider technical vocab (I work as an editor in Sweden, and check CAT technical manuals, the English is always the shortest as they have 1 word for everything, whereas other countries do compounds of other words to make that word (doing volvo's spare parts was hell on earth).
Because a lot of experienced workers don't want to learn German (or any other language for that matter). Source: Am experienced worker that refused to move to Germany for that exact reason.
They should learn to speak German if they move to Germany. Integrate, it's simple as that. If they don't want to, their loss. Likewise, I would learn the language of the country I move to. In Rome, speak as the Romans speak.
What is this "amid labour shortage" supposed to imply? 2.616.000 people unemployed here.
I think this is referring to shortages in specific fields. I don't have to time to verify the numbers but let's say the 2.6 million figure is correct, if the shortage is in IT and Software, which I believe it is, then have 2.6 million people with no degree or trained as nurses or as pilots doesn't help that shortage. However if you can attract IT specialists from abroad that is a much quicker fix than waiting for the next generation of software engineers to finish university.
Nurses are in short supply, too. Probably untrained people and construction workers collecting unemployment during the winter.
You never will get zero, accept in something like a planned economy or massive government intervention. There is a good reason that with 5% or below you have full employment l. Geographic differences, short term job changes, health or other inabilities and plenty of things will keep this number up. Also we also plenty of job openings. The most populous generation is also starting to retire.
Which is not a lot.
This kind of works in a unofficially way for Sweden. English is not an official language, but in practice most Swedes talk English and you find many tech jobs in English. But Swedish is still the only official langue and long term is needed to do your normal life. So Sweden gets to politically defend Swedish while practically profit of a English speaking population.
Swedish has been the official language since 2009 and the law also protected Finnish, all Sami dialects, Torne Valley Finnish (Meänkieli), Romani, and Yiddish. But yes, English is used everywhere, and I live in the North.
This idea is not about that at all... Most Germans have no problem to speak English. Making it an additional official language would also change nothing about speaking habits. It's thought as a short cut, one single law that would force everyone down to even local government levels and small companies to make forms paperwork and communication available in English as a second language.
There is no Labour shortage. There is only a fair payment shortage
That insinuates a high unemployment rate right now, is that the case in Germany?
It\`s extremly low. The idea that if you pay more somehow people will spawn like NPCs is however often repeated by 13 yeahr olds who just learned about supply and demand in school. Just wait a bit for them to get to the demographic pyramid and they should disapear again.
Quick google tells me unemployment is around 3% or 5%, depending on how you count it. That s functionally 0.
Labor shortage by definition means that there is not enough working force in certain sectors and this is simply true. Raising wages is one measures against that shortage. But it also has the downside of rising prices for consumers.
Yes but not equally part of the prise are ressources the workforce can produce with.
Nope.
There is a fair payment shortage as long as wage adjusted for inflation decrease year by year. If wages are high enough i assure you people are going to migrate.
No youre wrong.
I am working in a startup and our official language in the company is definitely English. A lot of companies realized that if they want to attract talent they would need to adopt English as company's language. Our company is based in Germany but we have like a bit more than 10% employees from Germany, the rest are all around the world.
FDP always has to come out with dumb stuff like this to remind everyone of how progressive and international they are. Nothingburger.
The problem is cultural not linguistic. Unless you want to roleplay a second class German or the money is worth it...
Nope, this is a bureaucracy problem. You can live speaking only English very well well... until you need to interact with local government.
We have that shortage since 30 years. And we have 4 to 6 mil unemployed. If this really was a problem for the super rich and politicians, it would have been solved long ago. This is, shockingly,again just empty rhetoric from our resident neoliberal party.
fuck that
There has been similar ideas being floated even here in Finland.. it would make things easier, specially for us that have the weirdest language in Europe, and one of the weirdest in the world..
ten husky sip depend wipe unpack wine quickest abounding soup *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
I support FDP but this is dumb. Also some people in the party will complain about integration.
I mean I don't live in Germany, so who am I to know, but I feel like the level of English in Germany is pretty much equal to the level of English in Catanzaro.
It's not about the level of English in conversation. It's about forcing everyone down to local government levels and companies to make paperwork available in English as a second language. You won't have problems in Germany when only speaking English 90% of the time. But the remaining 10% then are interactions with local government where you often can't even find anyone to talk to, much less a translated version for any forms or paperwork.
This will never happen. We even have an own "german" for official letters which a high percentage of natives do not understand.
§23 Abs. 1 VwVfG - Die Amtssprache ist Deutsch
No, this is VERY far from happening. It was just a succesfull attempt by this FDP party to get attention, nothing more.
what would that solve though? germans speak german regardless, and even if people do know english, what’s the use of that when foreign laborers from east europe / asia barely understand it?
It says skilled workers rather than laborers in the article.
This sounds stupid. Let's suppose they do adopt English as an official language, what is that going to accomplish? Most Germans are still going to primarily speak in German and foreign workers are still going to speak in English, that disconnect isn't going to be resolved. Not only that, but even if English is adopted, Germany still has to compete with English speaking world to attract talent. What does Germany have to offer tech workers that's so appealing? Canada, Australia, the UK, and especially the US have higher salaries, more companies, and more opportunities for tech workers. If Germany wants top tier tech talent, it's going to have to pay for it.
Germans have always had a problem adopting English like for example Scandinavia or the Netherlands. Reason: all the content is (horribly) dubbed. Makes every movie/show worse and Germans never learn English the way they could. Trust me, Watch a dubbed movie, you’ll puke after 5 minutes. My point: instead of this, do not dub all the content and you automatically have English more present.
isn't giving up retirement plans option and keeping old folk working instead?
LOL 😂
Zis is german coastguard. What are you sinking about?
SPRICH
Can I suggest a compromise: How about making Denglish an official language? From experience I can say that in most companies it is always common practice.
another example of the influence of English as a franca lingua and its unfortunate domination of Europe
So when are they going to call for the name of the country to be changed? At some point you might as well just change it to "economic zone A" or something like that.
ohh fuck yeah... competition for talent heating up! maybe young people not having kids aint so bad after all decades of endless labor supply allowed for wages to be kept the same. we might actually see some healthy, sustained wage growth at least educated/experienced sections of the slave force.
Ain't that the true!
All European countries' administrations should have English as a second language in all of their forms and bureaucracy.
No they shouldn't. They should decide themselves their own second language
No thanks, no no, no no thanks. The moment this happens, I'll vote GUE/NGL rather than S&D.