The acting Spanish Government has asked the European Union to create a precedent and make three languages (Catalan, Basque and Galician) official in the European institutions, which are only co-official in their respective autonomous communities, not in the entire Member State..
The 24 official languages of the EU are all official in their respective Member States or in several at the same time. Dutch is, for example, official in the Netherlands and Belgium. And German is German in Germany, Austria and also in Belgium.. No language considered a minority of the 27 countries that make up the EU is official in the European institutions.
Being an official language does not mean being a working language, a privilege reserved for English, despite the Brexit consummated in January 2020.. French and, to a lesser extent, German are also working languages, to a lesser extent.. Spanish is not. Working languages are those used in meetings between officials in which there are hardly any interpreters and in which numerous documents are drawn up..
The request formulated on August 17 by the Minister of Foreign Affairs, José Manuel Albares, will most likely be rejected this Tuesday by the Community Council of Ministers. Any change to the linguistic regime, established in 1958, requires unanimity. For budgetary reasons, some Member States are opposed to this, despite the fact that the Spanish Government offered to bear all the expenses that would be generated..
The expenses are enormous, because it is not just about having interpreters in the European Parliament. Millions of documents from the Community acquis would have to be translated into Catalan, Basque and Galician since the European Coal and Steel Community was founded in 1951, the first step in European construction.. Only the treaties and some very basic documents were already translated years ago.
Other member countries are also reluctant to the initiative for fear that demands similar to those of the Catalan or Basque nationalists will arise among their population that speaks minority languages.. In May, the French State got the Court to prohibit the use of Catalan in the plenary sessions of some town councils in the Department of the Pyrenees-Orientales..
The EU will end up expanding towards the Balkans in the next decade. From Moldovan to Albanian, passing through Macedonian, they will then become official languages. What's more, if Cyprus achieves its reunification, Turkish, spoken in the north of the island, will also be. Greenland changed its official language from Danish to Greenlandic in 2009, and its self-government law allows it to declare independence from Copenhagen after holding a referendum.. If he takes that step, he will probably request that Greenlandic, a language from the Inuit family spoken by fewer than 50,000 people, be official in the EU.. The Tower of Babel will therefore continue to grow in the coming years.
Only one language, Gaelic, has been added, for now, belatedly to those that were already official. Ireland achieved it 49 years after joining the EU. When Dublin joined in 1973, it made no linguistic demands and settled for English.. In 2005, he did demand that Gaelic be the official language of the European institutions, as it was in Ireland itself.. It then took 17 years to achieve it and its status is not completely comparable to other languages because, due to lack of interpretation, it cannot, for example, be used in the European Parliament.. The status of Maltese is similar to Gaelic.
At the opposite pole of Ireland is Luxembourg, one of the six founders of what is today the European Union.. The spelling of Luxembourgish was standardized in 1976 and eight years later it became the only national language of the Grand Duchy, although German and, above all, French have the status of administrative languages.. The Luxembourg Government did not then request that its national language become an official language of the EU.
The EU linguistic regime is unfair for Catalan and, to a lesser extent, for Basque. It is because Catalan speakers (9.2 million Spaniards and French) are much more numerous, for example, than those who speak Danish (5.85 million), whose language is official in the EU.. There are more Catalan speakers in the EU than native English speakers (5.2 million Irish) and their language is not only an official language, but also a working language in the institutions.. There are about 800,000 Basque speakers, while Maltese is only used by half a million people. It's unfair, but there is no solution in sight.
The Gallego is not as disadvantaged as the Catalan or the Euskera. Ana Miranda, MEP of the Galician Nationalist Bloc, sometimes expresses herself in the European Parliament in what she calls the “universal Galician”. It is translated into other languages, without any difficulty, by Portuguese interpreters. The reintegrationists, a linguistic and cultural movement from Galicia, maintain that Galician and Portuguese are part of the same linguistic system. In other words, Universal Galician is now, in practice, the official language of the EU.
The linguistic demand of the Catalan and Basque nationalists, transferred to the EU by the Government of Spain, is reactivated, paradoxically, at a time when English tends to relegate all other languages to the background in the European Parliament and in other institutions. MEPs, especially younger ones, have a growing tendency to dispense with interpreters and address the chamber or committees before which they speak in English. They do so not only because they master Shakespeare's language, but because they consider that, by using the lingua franca, they will be better understood.