As though following on seamlessly from the previous blogpost, a recent article in The Guardian asks “Will Brexit spell the end of English as an official EU language?” The article is book-ended with a couple of playfully incendiary rhetorical grenades: an EU official suggesting that “if we don’t have the UK, we don’t have English” – an utterance beyond nonsense as this article argues – and the concluding suggestion that “once Latin was everyone’s second language, it was no longer anyone’s first”.

The Latin reference begs a number of questions, starting with doubts over the definitions of ‘everyone’ and ‘anyone’. Long after it ceased to be the language of the Roman counting house, Latin hung on as a badge of cultural exceptionalism, most useful to the officers of a religion with an evolving need to reverse engineer modern contexts to ancient gospels while keeping the oiks in the street out of any debate.

This mediating power declined rapidly in Europe with the spread of German and English-language bibles in the 15th- and 16th centuries, and now its influence is pretty much the province of playful poets and posturing public schoolboys. But at no point ever did Latin, although an effective touchpaper for a family of modern languages, possess either the commercial power or the political potency of English or Mandarin in today’s world.

A point neglected by the Guardian article, and a vital one ahead of any defenestration of English as “an official language” of the EU, is what language (if any) could supplant it. Advocates for French would cite its influence as the language of the diplomatic salon, at least through the Treaty of Versailles and the negotiations over the League of Nations a century ago. Champions of Spanish would cite its global status in terms of speaker numbers, as second only to English among the European languages, with French a distant third.

But questions of primacy and status will always devolve not to population sizes but to realms of influence of those speakers, usually and broadly concerned with matters of commercial, cultural, and political clout. In this context it is interesting to look at the Times Higher Education University Rankings, which for 2020 lists more than twice as many universities for which English is the primary language, as against those institutions representing all other languages combined.

Intriguingly, the Times list explains its choices by referencing “13 carefully calibrated performance indicators that measure an institution’s performance across teaching, research, knowledge transfer and international outlook” – not at all bad as criteria for any dynamic continent’s designation of an “official language”. The question that the EU might ask itself is: “What do we want to accomplish with the rest of the world?”

As for the United Kingdom, given that it has been punching well above its weight in all of these categories since at least the time of Shakespeare, the Brexit question now must concern the capacity of English to understand and consolidate its soft power potential in an increasingly fractious world.