European Day of Languages 2023

Today is the European Day of Languages again.  The EU promote linguistic diversity and encourages everyone to speak multiple foreign languages.  There are 27 EU member countries and the EU has 24 official languages.   

The official EU languages are Bulgarian, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Irish (Gaelic), Italian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Maltese, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, and Swedish.

This means that EU legislation must be published in all 24 languages.  All EU citizens have the right to communicate with EU institutions in any of the official languages.

Within the EU, the European Parliament is the most linguistically diverse institution.  All 24 EU languages are used as MEPs may speak any official language.  Very diverse but it's expensive to have interpreters and translators to handle all 24 languages.  

The European Commission values efficiency over linguistic diversity.  While legally bound to all 24 languages of the EU, in practice the three main working languages are English, French and German.

Adding or removing a language to the official list requires the approval of all 27 EU members.  This is normally a part of the ascension process when a country joins the EU.  For example, Croatian became an official language when Croatia joined the EU in 2013.

When Luxembourg joined the EU in 1957, back when it was originally the European Economic Community (EEC), the national languages were French and German.  Both of which were official languages.  In 1984, Luxembourg made Luxembourgish an official national language.  However, it is not an official EU language because (a) Luxembourg didn't submit it as a language when it joined, and (b) to add it now would require all 27 countries to agree.

In Cyprus, both Greek and Turkish are official languages but only Greek is an official EU language.  More or less, kind of for the same reason as in Luxembourg.  

Last month, Spain formally requested that Catalan, Basque, and Galician all become official EU languages.  I don't think that this will happen anytime soon because all 27 countries have to agree, plus the associated administrative cost of adding three new languages.

English is an official language in Ireland and Malta, which is why English stayed an official EU language even after the UK left the EU.