German Finance Minister: Badly spoken English, the most spoken language in the world

German Finance Minister: Wolfang Schäuble

Schäuble believes that English will be the language of European unification, since most young people speak it and it is the idiom of choice at multinational companies.

However Schäuble admits his poor English proficiency in the interview. Revealing that he has he has this in common with some other German politicians, like European Union Commissioner Günther Oettinger and Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle, whose English deficiency is well known.

“Badly spoken English is however the most spoken language in the world,” Schäuble joked in the interview.

The finance minister said that in the course of his former position as interior minister he had suggested at the European Council in Brussel that the Union should do away with translators and adopt English as its official language. So that everyone would be forced to speak english language. 

But Nicholas Sarkozy, the French interior minister at the time, was not in favor of that, fearing that holding the meetings in English would give the British an advantage.

“I told him that it was actually a much larger disadvantage for them because we would destroy their language,” Schäuble said.

I didn’t know Schäuble has a good sense of humour.