Currently there are $24$ official languages recognized within the EU$,$ this has been the situation since the accession of Croatia. In $1958,$ legislation specified German, French, Italian and Dutch as the official and working languages of the EU$$s predecessor, the European Communities.

There have always been fewer official languages than EU Member States, as some EU Member States share common languages, for example in Belgium, where the official languages are Dutch, French and German, while in Cyprus the majority of the population speaks Greek.

There are also a number of indigenous regional and minority languages $($such as Catalan, Galician and Basque in Spain, or Welsh and Scottish Gaelic in the United Kingdom$)$ found within the EU$,$ as well as many other languages that have been brought into the EU by migrant populations, notably Arabic, Turkish, Urdu, Hindi and Chinese.

Some regional languages, such as Catalan and Welsh, have gained a status as co$-$official languages of the EU and the official use of such languages can be authorized on the basis of an administrative arrangement concluded between the Council and the requesting EU Member State.

Increasingly, inexorably, and seemingly inevitably, English has squeezed out every other language in the competition to become the common tongue of Europe. It found that English is the most popular foreign language in all but five European countries, and all of those are small nations that use the language of their larger neighbors. Finally, two out of three people across the continent have at least a fair working knowledge of English.

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Question $|$ In this scenario, English serves as a $\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_,$ enabling communication between people who do not share a native language or dialect, particularly when it is a third language that is distinct from both native languages.

Group of answer choices

engineered language

adopted dialect

synthetic language

cohesive medium

lingua franca