The tower of Babel or the EU’s fascinating nature?
Should the working and official languages of the EU be reduced or increased?
When it comes to challenges that the European Union is currently facing, language-related ones are not the first to come to mind. Economic, political, and more than ever, health challenges are all considered of larger importance by the general press. Nevertheless, languages are a fundamental part of the European Union structure and identity and hold an important place in European integration. With the rising importance of English as a second language across Europe and the world, and the integration of various new EU member states since 2004, questions like “should English be the only working language?” or even “are there too many official languages?” have been raised recently. In this article, I argue that the working and official languages of the EU hold a fundamental role in policymaking and therefore should not be reduced.
Language protection and democracy go hand in hand…
The European Union has 24 official languages, also known as treaty languages, and 3 working, vehicular, or procedural languages. For the sake of clarity, in this article, you’ll see me referring to them as official and working languages. Different institutions have different main working languages. For example, the European Central Bank (ECB) has English, the European Court of Justice (ECJ) has French, while the European Commission (EC) has French, English, and German. These 3 languages are used by a large part of the EU staff when it comes to internal workings. The 24 official languages on the other hand are used by the European Parliament (EP), and all documents of high importance are translated into those languages.
Unlike the meetings of the Commission and the Councils, which mostly take place behind closed doors, the sessions of the EU parliament are open to the public. These sessions represent the only opportunity for public discussion of proposals for new legislation. If the number of official languages employed in the European Parliament was to be reduced, it would entail a limitation or invalidation of the democratic nature of these sessions. A situation of inequality would arise between citizens with higher or lower-level language fluency. Therefore it can be said that language protection and democracy go hand in hand: less freedom of expression in native languages results in less democracy.
If people have no way of reading and discussing policies, laws, and treaties in their own languages, how can they know their rights?
The main argument for reducing the use of all 24 EU languages is that providing translation and interpretation is too costly, but when this cost (1 billion €) is compared to the whole EU budget, it appears very small in comparison. In fact, it is less than 1% of the 2013 EU budget. An interesting way of reducing EU expenditures that wouldn’t cause language discrimination would be to only use the Brussels hemicycle instead of using both Brussels’ and Strasbourg’s ones. In fact, “Every month, the EP moves all its operations from Brussels to Strasbourg, to hold meetings in a building that remains empty the rest of the time. The yearly cost of doing so is estimated at about €200 million”. This amount of money equals a fifth (1/5) of all EU spending on the total cost of translation and interpretation in all the EU institutions, which is around €1 billion per year.
Reducing language diversity would increase discrimination drastically.
As Domenico Cosmai (2014) argues “A lack of ability in foreign languages must in no way constitute a barrier or, even worse, a cause for discrimination against a European citizen.” In fact, only 14% of high school pupils in France are competent in their first foreign language (English). Although members of the European Parliament (MEPs) are often well-educated people, to run as one there is no requirement to be fluent in English, or French. The services of translation and live-interpretation available are aimed to both enhance communication by allowing MEPs to use their best-known language, and to make the delay between the original speech and the translation as short as possible. It also needs to be remembered that even if someone has a good level in a foreign language, using their mother tongue might be the only way to express themselves fully and in an accurate way. As expression in the EP is done through speech, languages play a vital role in policymaking. When key votes and discussions happen, an MEP should be allowed to choose one of the 24 official languages they know best, whether it is Maltese, Lithuanian, or English. Failing to explain themselves well could cause major problems to the EU’s future.
In the journal essay called A mismatch between policy and practice, Alessia Cogo and Jennifer Jenkins argue the importance of “English as a lingua franca in Europe”. Making such a change would take an incredible amount of institutional change, as both the EU Charter of fundamental rights and the Treaty on European Union recognize linguistic equality and the importance of multilingualism. Furthermore, reducing the working languages, let alone the official languages, to only English would immediately decrease the number of people who can and will work in the European institutions.
The European Union’s multilingualism is not rooted in its bureaucracy or stubbornness, but rather in the protection of minority rights, democracy, and its diverse culture. Although democracy comes at a cost and governments constantly need to invest in it, it is not an area that needs to be actively pulled apart. Improving technology or restructuring the democratic system can reduce budget expenditures while not infringing on democracy. Maintaining the number of working and official languages is one of the ways to guarantee stability in the European Union.
