English rules...

Babelling on: Brussels versus the English language

THE ECONOMIST, December 13th 2006

In their loftier moments Brussels politicians say that languages are an expression of the European Union's unity in diversity. What they seldom admit is that languages are a logistical and expensive headache, as well as a cause of nationalistic squabbles. All these could increase when the tally of official languages in the EU rises from 20 to 23 on January 1st 2007, with the addition of Romanian, Bulgarian and Irish.

There is impeccable democratic logic for the EU to do business in the language of its citizens: hence the addition of Bulgarian and Romanian when these countries join next month. It is less obvious why Irish is being added to the list. Although it is an official language of Ireland, it is a minority one that the Irish government declined to use when it joined in 1973. The government concedes that less than half the population can speak it and a mere 5% actually use it. But Charlie McCreevy, Ireland's European commissioner, insists it is central to Irish cultural identity.

Asserting cultural identity may be more important in a growing club. Ireland's decision has raised the stakes for other countries. Last year Spain requested semi-official status for Catalan, Galician and Basque. The Spanish government will foot the bill for translation services for Spaniards who prefer to use those languages. Welsh nationalist politicians are now lobbying the British government to get the same deal for Welsh, although not so far to any effect.

Getting national governments to pick up the tab for using regional languages can keep the EU's costs down. In 2005 the union spent some €1.1 billion ($1.4 billion) on translation and interpretation. This pays for staff to interpret at 11,000 meetings a year and to translate more than 1.3m pages of text. One result of the latest enlargement is that the commission has instructed officials to write shorter, snappier communications that cost less to translate. But not all problems are so easy. A plan in 2002 to simplify European patents failed when some countries blocked it because the new patent would be only in English, French and German. Subsequent efforts to find a compromise have foundered because of high translation costs.

English, French and German are the main working languages of the European Commission, a truce agreed some 20 years ago. At that time half of all EU documents were drafted in English. Now it is around two-thirds, as enlargement to Scandinavia and Eastern Europe has created a bigger group of people with English as their first choice of second language. This points to an unsettling conclusion for advocates of multilingualism: in a union of many languages, increasingly there is but one language.

To do:

1. Describe and comment the photo above the text.
2. Translate the highlighted words and phrases in the text above.
3. Describe what THE ECONOMIST is.
4. Draw up a list of minority languages used in Europe.

Questions:

1. Why is Irish being added to the list of official languages?
2. What is the “growing club” (first sentence, third paragraph)?
3. Who do you think should pay for the cost of translation and interpretation of regional languages at Brussels (the EU itself or national governments)?
4. Who are the “advocates of multilingualism” (last sentence of text)?
5. Which language is the most used in the European Union institutions and why is it the most used?
6. Do you defend the use of several languages for European Union institutions?

Teacher’s comments on the blog post “English rules”

What do we learn about Europe from The Economist article?

• That many languages are spoken in Europe (about 225).
• That there are minority languages (i.e. languages spoken by few people).
• That “language” is a term used to describe a high status for the way a people communicate (“language” is not argot, patois, pidgin, dialect, etc.).
• That in the EU institutions, there are official languages (24 today: Bulgarian, French, Maltese, Croatian, German, Polish, Czech, Greek, Portuguese, Danish, Hungarian, Romanian, Dutch, Irish, Slovak, English, Italian, Slovene, Estonian, Latvian, Spanish, Finnish, Lithuanian, Swedish).
• Some minority languages seek “official language” status (i.e. a language recognized by the state and by the EU).
• If a minority has its language recognized as an “official language” it means that it is recognized as actually being a people (living in a region “apart” within their country and within the EU), for example the Cornish, the Welsh, the Catalan, etc.
• That the cost of translating official EU documents is rising as the number of official languages increase.
• That initiatives to reduce the cost of translation (i.e. by producing shorter documents or reducing the number of languages translated) have failed.
• That there is an issue as to who should pay for the cost of translating official documents into minority languages (the EU or national governments who support the use of minority languages?).
• English is now the language most often used in EU institutions (because it is most people’s second language).
• If English dominates EU institutions (because it is practical and cost effective to use), does it not compromise the promotion of cultural and linguistic diversity by the EU? Is “Unity in diversity” (which is the EU motto) being replaced by “unity in conformity”?