Which are the languages of the EU?
Description
This article is from the European Union FAQ, by Roland Siebelink & Bart Schelfhout with numerous contributions by others.
Which are the languages of the EU?
Like most international organisations, the EU has two sorts of languages:
official languages and working languages. Official languages are used for
official public documents, especially those with legal value. Working
languages are the languages used internally. Sometimes there is also talk of
treaty languages: these are said to be official languages in which only
basic legal texts are translated, and not all official public documents with
legal value. Since EU legislation is directly applicable in national law,
all languages with official legal status in one or more of the member states
should be official EU languages as well. This means that there are now
eleven official EU languages:
German (88.8 million inhabitants of linguistic area*: in Germany,
Austria, Belgium, Italy and Luxembourg)
French (63.3 million, in France, Belgium, Luxembourg and Italy)
English (60.0 million, in UK and Republic of Ireland)
Italian (56.4 million, in Italy)
Spanish (39.2 million, in Spain)
Dutch (21.1 million, in the Netherlands and Belgium)
Greek (10.3 million, in Greece)
Portuguese (9.8 million, in Portugal)
Swedish (9.0 million, in Sweden and Finland)
Danish (5.2 million, in Denmark)
Finnish (4.7 million, in Finland).
Every member state has decided for itself what language(s) to make official
EU languages; thus, these figures do not take into account recognised
+minority; languages such as Catalan and Frisian, nor of officially
recognised national languages such as irish (which is only a treaty
language, not an official language) and Letzebuergesch (which has been
recognised as a national language only in 1983).
Council members have never been able to agree on a limit to the number of
working languages within the institutions. All official languages are
considered equal in every way. It should be noted though that, in practice,
some languages are more equal than others. The Commission has limited much
of its internal translations to French, English and German; some informal
meetings do not have interpreters at all and are conducted in English
entirely. Nick Bernard[6] says the Court of Justice uses French as an
internal working language. According to Bart Schelfhout[7], this is due to
the fact that French is far more considered a juristic language (precision
and vocabulary) than is English
EU interpretation services have already noted that the current expansion to
eleven working languages will already be virtually unworkable; an expansion
to sixteen or more (with some former Eastern Bloc countries joining) will be
technically impossible. It is therefore to be expected, in my view, that the
number of working languages will be limited to three (English, French and
German) or five (with Italian and Spanish), if only for passive use
(languages to translate into)
Still, Marc Bonnaud[8] notes that
+The EU Coucil of Ministers of 12 June 95 has not only reaffirmed i
ts firm attachment to Linguistic Diversity , it has also decided to
setup a commission to check that all the Institutions respect this,
and first of all, those concerned with the +information society; (DG
XIII which violates daily the founding treaties and the regulation #
1 of the Commission). The Commission has been invited to make yearly
reports on the application of these decisions. [...] I expect these
decisions to be included one way or another in the revised Treaty.;
Carsten Quell[9] of the Freie Universitdt Berlin has done extensive research
on this topic.
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