- English is enough!

The Norwegian government, it all its wisdom and understanding of tomorrow's challenges has come to the conclusion that pupils in secondary education only need to learn one foreign language, english. The fact that our economy relies heavily on trade and that our major trading partners are not english speaking countries, but the European mainland is of cource irrelevant in this context. After all, being able to speak the mother tounge of your partner has never been an adventage in business. Further more, as we all know, for Norwegian interest groups going to Brussels speaking mediocre english is all you need to convince an Austrian or Italian or Slovak or Portugese eurocrat. No, I'm truly glad to see that my beloved government has realised the uselessness of learning german, the language of our main trading partner on the Continent and the language of the country from which most of our cultural impulses has come from. I'm glad today's teenagers and tomorrow's leaders, workers, whitecollars, don't have to learn french, the language of international politics, the language of reason and the language of love. It thrills me to learn that twenty years from now the fight for lingual pluralism will be over and all we'll have left are business executives speaking like Thor Heyerdal and only like Thor Heyerdal.