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The Languages of the European Union

> Official Languages...

> ...and Unofficial Languages

> Catalan


dijous, 24 de juny de 2004
On the 17th and 18th of June, at the Brussels summit, the European Union reached a very significant political milestone, and came to an agreement on the Constitution. European linguistic diversity was also discussed at this summit. We shall be talking about this diversity here.

As you probably know, over the last few months there has been a lot of talk about officially recognising the so-called minority languages. The Spanish Government introduced the debate into the seat of the EU institutions when, in May, it asked that Catalan (as well as Galician and Basque) be given an equivalent status to Gaelic.

Recognition of this status would have meant, among other things, the translation into these languages of the Constitutional Treaty and the possibility of using them to address any European authority.

However, this recognition has not been possible in the end, at least not in its entirety. True, there was an agreement in Brussels to translate the Constitution into the languages that are official in various parts of Spain, and an appendix was introduced into the Constitution that is favourable to European linguistic diversity and the need to preserve it. But the motion to allow citizens to consult and receive a reply from the European institutions in these languages was rejected.

Official Languages...


+ English, German and French are widely spoken.
With the enlargement on the 1st of May 2004, there are now twenty official European Union languages: German, English, Danish, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Estonian, Finnish, French, Greek, Hungarian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Maltese, Dutch, Polish, Portuguese, Swedish and Czech. Some of these languages are spoken by many millions of European citizens. This is the case for German, French, English, Italian and Spanish. The ranking is headed by German, with more than eighty-eight million speakers. On the other hand, there are others that hardly reach a million. Maltese, for example, has four hundred thousand speakers, and Estonian around a million.

...and Unofficial Languages


+ European Union is a patchwork of languages.
To these twenty languages, we must add a good number more that are not official at the European Union. Apart from Catalan, which we shall discuss below, among the most spoken non-official languages we find Galician, Occitan, Sardinian, Basque, Welsh and Gaelic. But the list is much longer, and includes tongues such as Breton, Friulian, Franco-Provencal, Corsican, Russian, Ukrainian, Frisian, Turkish, Luxembourgish… As you can see, the European Union is truly a patchwork of languages.

Catalan


+ Catalan is the eleventh most spoken language in the EU.
Of all the unofficial languages, Catalan is by a long way the most widely spoken. Over seven million people speak it and around ten million understand it. It has been calculated that Catalan is spoken by one third of the European Union citizens that regularly use a minority language. And that's not all. The number of Catalan speakers is similar to the number of Greek, Portuguese, Swedish, Hungarian and Czech speakers. Catalan is currently the eleventh most spoken language in the European Union (before expansion this year, it was the seventh).

MATERIALS

  • Mapes lingüístics
    Format:Web
    Una sèrie de mapes lingüístics d'Europa i Àsia.
  • Languages of Europe
    Format:Web
    Espai de la BBC dedicat a les llengües europees: característiques, mots bàsics, estats on es parlen...
  • Eurolang
    Format:Web
    Agència, amb seu a Brussel·les, que informa de les minories lingüístiques de la Unió Europea.
  • European Bureau for Lesser-Used Languages
    Format:Web
    Entitat que treballa en favor del reconeixement de les llengües minoritàries.
  • Euromosaic
    Format:Web
    Centre de documentació i anàlisi de les llengües minoritàries de la Unió Europea.
  • Envia la flama a Europa en defensa del català
    Format:Web
    Pàgina especial de VilaWeb que us permet d'enviar una flama virtual de Sant Joan als governs espanyol, francès i irlandès i a la Comissió Europea, en senyal de protesta per la discriminació del català a la constitució europea.

QUE HO SABIES?

  • Luxembourgish, which is a co-official language in Luxembourg alongside German and French, is not official in Europe. And this country is one of the six founding members of what is today the European Union. Luxembourgish is a mid-East German dialect.
  • Maltese is an Arabic dialect, written in the Latin alphabet and strongly influenced by ancient Sicilian.
  • German is spoken, to differing degrees of course, in eleven European Union states: Germany, Austria, Belgium, Luxembourg, France, Denmark, Italy, Hungary, Poland, the Czech Republic and Slovakia.

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