These changes are only applicable to users in the EEA. For those outside the region, Windows will continue to function as it is!
The changes to Windows for DMA-compliance include:
- You can now uninstall Edge and Bing web search using the built-in settings. Earlier, the option was greyed out.
- Third-party web search application developers can now utilize the Windows search box in the taskbar using the instructions provided by Microsoft and choose any web browser to show results from the web.
- Microsoft will no longer sign-in users to Edge, Bing, and Microsoft Start services during the initial Windows setup experience.
- Data collected about the functioning of non-Microsoft apps, primarily bug detection and its effects on the OS, from Windows PCs will not be used for competitive purposes.
- Microsoft, from now on, will need explicit user consent before combining data from the OS and other sources. It will also deliver new consent screens where required.
but the rest is perfectly cromulent
“Competences”, “planification”, “to hop over” (=to refrain from)? Sorry, that stuff is downright grotesque.
Remember these aren’t high school mistakes they’re stuff that C2 speakers use
I can’t remember that because the WP article didn’t claim that. In fact, if you make these mistakes, you’re not C2, by definition.
just as you’ll see American generals writing reports using “less” instead of “fewer”, or “good” instead of “well”, or “who” instead of “whom” (shudder). “was” instead of “were”.
Except that this is language change from within the native community, in their native language, aimed from native speakers at other natives who will understand or (if they don’t understand them or use a different variety) correct them. Some of that stuff (who-whom, was-were) is well-established in already existing usage and dialects, it’s not an innovation at all.
That’s language evolution, plain and simple, things change as they always have and the language does different things in different places.
I’ll repeat myself: no, this isn’t ordinary language change, as this “Euro English” is simply a local characteristic of this or that speaker who failed to learn English as it is used by native speakers. ‘Euro English’ is not a real unit, as it has no defining characteristics. Imagine a European using some calque from his native language while talking to a European who has a different native language and who can’t understand the calque - this is not what happens in a normal speech community, these people will fail to understand each other, and their English is not a stable or reliably identifiable linguistic variety. You can see that especially in the table with “Euro English vocabulary”, where words are clearly marked by their origin, and they won’t be understood or will be found absurd by many other Europeans.
“Competences”, “planification”, “to hop over” (=to refrain from)? Sorry, that stuff is downright grotesque.
So, I have heard, is Indians using “doing the needful”. Native English speakers using that phrase, mind you. People also get their underwear in a twist over “aks” which, as a variant, goes back to at least Old English. It may go back further but we don’t have written evidence for Proto-West-Germanic so it’s impossible to tell.
Except that this is language change from within the native community,
To call the one evolution and the other mistake you need to do better than “one group learned the language at an earlier age”, as a linguist making that claim you’d have to demonstrate that both sets of changes follow fundamentally different laws, or one side follows laws, the other doesn’t.
And, FWIW, I have lost count how often people assumed I’m a native English speaker. Even Brits managed to pin my accent to their east coast, which isn’t terribly wrong but still on the wrong side of the North Sea. And I didn’t even start to learn the language that early, only starting at age 10 or so nowadays kids are starting at 6.
and who can’t understand the calque
Oh. That’s a nice one. Find me a European language where “flea market” doesn’t translate properly. Also Euro English doesn’t always use calques, e.g. Spitzenkandidat didn’t get turned into point candidate but even if it did it’d be perfectly cromulent as it matches English “to take point”. The translation “lead candidate”, I think, comes from Anglophones. It’s not terribly precise, semantically speaking. They’re not leaders as-such, they’re spear tips thrust by their party.
European languages have been in intense contact with each other for time immemorial there’s plenty of common structure underneath the differences, even among those that aren’t descendants of PIE. Flea market, for example, works in Hungarian and Finnish. As said: Find me a language where it isn’t understood.
English elsewhere is losing “whom” because monolingual native speakers by and large seem to be incapable of understanding the difference even if you point out to them that they’re using “he” vs. “him” all the time. If your native language is a romance one you might be in a similar boat, if it’s Slavic or Germanic, most of which retain a lot more case structure than English, it’s dead obvious and not using “whom” sounds plain wrong. The evolutionary inertia thus has a different direction, doesn’t mean that it’s not following proper evolutionary laws, that it’s a mistake to bat an eye on the overuse of “who”.
So, I have heard, is Indians using “doing the needful”. Native English speakers using that phrase, mind you. People also get their underwear in a twist over “aks” which, as a variant, goes back to at least Old English.
You’re mixing up different topics here. Indians are native speakers, if I’m not mistaken, they’ve learned that phrase from other Indian English speakers and they use it among themselves with no problem. Same as “aks”. These are definitely legitimate varieties, acceptable within those communities, regardless of what outsiders may say.
Where is the community of speakers that finds all these “Euro English” forms acceptable? I’m evidently not a part of that community, because I don’t talk as that article describes.
To call the one evolution and the other mistake you need to do better than “one group learned the language at an earlier age”, as a linguist making that claim you’d have to demonstrate that both sets of changes follow fundamentally different laws, or one side follows laws, the other doesn’t.
Well that’s very much the point, exactly, Euro English doesn’t follow any laws in particular. To reduce the problem to the age of learning is bordering on deliberate misunderstanding. Native English speakers learn to not use “whom” from their parents and their surroundings, they get by without using it, and the linguistic phenomenon is self-sustaining. Non-natives in Europe learn English from their teachers, who (should) have a close-to-native grasp of language, and from native speaker content that they’re exposed to regularly (especially the younger generations, who can spend hours communicating with natives directly through voice chat). Deviations from the models (teachers and natives) are not created through communication with other European non-natives. With the people from your own country, you speak in your native language, and you use English for the rest of the world, regardless of whether the speaker on the other end is European, Asian, African, or anything else, and their influence won’t be systematic. Deviations from the native model are always a result of the native language (again, we’re talking about dozens of native languages, resulting in completely unrelated sorts of deviations), and they are not nearly as hard-coded as the native language; the speaker, if made aware of his mistakes, will try to correct them, at least when it comes to grammar (pronunciation being especially difficult to master).
I would definitely expect a linguist describing a language variety to, to express it more visually, draw a Venn diagram with the characteristics of that variety that the speakers use, and to figure out some common ground, some defining and typical characteristics. If there is no common ground, and I firmly believe there none for the supposed Euro English, then we might at best talk about multipe varieties, and not one single meaningful unit. Like, do you and me count as speakers of Euro English? Do Russians and French count, including those I’ve heard speaking English so bad I had to ask them to switch to their native language so I could understand them? Does my sister count, who chats with Americans, Europeans and Asians on the regular through Discord? Do the European politicians, with their awkward pronunciation and annoying jargon? These are some very different Englishes, with nothing in common with regards to pronunciation, and, I believe, also nothing with regards to grammar. The WP explicitly narrows it down to “EU staff, expatriates and migrants from EU countries, young international travellers (such as exchange students in the EU’s Erasmus programme) and European diplomats with a lower proficiency in the language”, which is somewhat acceptable, maybe, except I doubt these groups have actually been studied systematically and compared within themselves and against other Europeans’ Englishes.
This is the crux of the issue, basically. To speak of something, you need a definition of it. There’s no differentia specifica here, these people do not seem to form a community, and their language has no distinct characteristics or rules (stuff that tells you “me likes to eating cake” is not proper English - to describe a linguistic variety/dialect/language, it is necessary to be able to describe correct and incorrect sentences in it).
Find me a European language where “flea market” doesn’t translate properly.
You mean as a calque? Without digging around much: my native Croatian (buvljak), and Russian (baraholka). In Croatian the word actually is etymologically related to the word for ‘flea’, but I didn’t even notice that it’s connected until you asked this, as it underwent a sound change that’s rare in Croatian (buha > buva). It also lacks the “market” element. The calque would sound very different and would be incomprehensible. The Russian word can be etymologically explained as “the place for selling old/worthless objects”.
European languages have been in intense contact with each other for time immemorial there’s plenty of common structure underneath the differences
An occasional term that’s been translated across several languages is hardly an element of common structure. The languages are varied enough not to be conductive to creating a remotely uniform Euro English.
English elsewhere is losing “whom” because monolingual native speakers by and large seem to be incapable of understanding the difference even if you point out to them that they’re using “he” vs. “him” all the time. If your native language is a romance one you might be in a similar boat, if it’s Slavic or Germanic, most of which retain a lot more case structure than English, it’s dead obvious and not using “whom” sounds plain wrong.
My native language is Slavic and I absolutely do not find the who-whom>who-who an issue, as I learned English from native speaker material (texts, mainly) and decent enough teachers who themselves follow native speakers, rather than applying the Slavic case structure to English. Perhaps I’m more inclined to using ‘whom’ than the average native, but even then I don’t use it systematically (maybe I barely use it at all, really, it’s hard to tell).
Where is the community of speakers that finds all these “Euro English” forms acceptable?
With the people from your own country, you speak in your native language, and you use English for the rest of the world, regardless of whether the speaker on the other end is European, Asian, African, or anything else
In Europe. English is the Lingua Franca, if you have a Danish plumber talking to a French electrician on an Italian building site it’s going to be in English. The examples though are mostly from Brussels, which also explains why there’s so many administrative terms in there.
And, true, English is an international Lingua Franca. We have a lot more contact with other Europeans than with, say, Japanese, though, and also way more shared history with it.
except I doubt these groups have actually been studied systematically and compared within themselves and against other Europeans’ Englishes.
Have you tried to address that doubt by doing a literature review, there’s studies going back to at least 2000. Also that’s not how you use the plural of English, or do you mean that each of them speak multiple varieties? Going out on a limb, the Slavic languages are quite steadfast indeed when it comes to number agreement across cases. Are you speaking Slavo-English? If another linguistic group doesn’t mind that kind of construction and adopts it, might that constitute Euro-English?
