User:Michkalas/EU language policy

European Union
a comprehensive summary

European Union has 23 official and working languages: Bulgarian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Irish, Latvian, Lithuanian, Maltese, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Slovak, Slovene, Spanish and Swedish. According to the latest special Eurobarometer survey (February 2006), in the citizens of the EU of 25 members (i.e. before Bulgaria and Romania acceded), German was the most widely spoken mother tongue with 18% of the speakers, followed by English and Italian with 13% and French with 12%. As a language other than mother tongue, English is spoken by 38% of the citizens and German and French by 14%. Either as mother tongue or as a foreign language, English is the most widely spoken language in the EU with 51%. 56% of citizens in the EU Member States are able to hold a conversation in one language apart from their mother tongue. All EU official languages belong to the Indo-European language family, except Estonian, Finnish, and Hungarian, which belong to the Finno-Ugric language family, and except Maltese, which is a Semitic language. All EU official languages are written in the latin alphabet, except Bulgarian, written in Cyrillic, and Greek, written in Greek alphabet.

EU provides interpretation, translation and publication services in its official languages. Not every document generated by the EU is translated into all the official languages. Legislation and documents of major public importance or interest are produced in all 23 official languages, but that accounts for a minority of the institutions' work. Other documents (e.g. communications with the national authorities, decisions addressed to particular individuals or entities and correspondence) are translated only into the languages needed. For internal purposes the EU institutions are allowed by law to choose their own language arrangements. The European Commission, for example, conducts its internal business in three languages, English, French and German, and goes fully multilingual only for public information and communication purposes. The European Parliament, on the other hand, has members who need working documents in their own languages, so its document flow is fully multilingual from the outset. In the EU, language policy is the responsibility of member states and European Union does not have a "common language policy". Based on the "principle of subsidiarity", European Union institutions play a supporting role in this field, promoting cooperation between the member states and promoting the European dimension in the member states language policies, particularly through the teaching and dissemination of the languages of the member states. Though the European Union has very limited influence in this area as the content of educational systems is the responsibility of individual member states, a number of European Union funded programmes, most prominently the much wider Lifelong learning Programme 2007-2013, actively promote foreign language learning, specifically the target of mother tongue plus two other languages,.

There are about 150 regional and minority languages, spoken by up to 50 million people, but the exact number depends on how you define a language as opposed to a dialect. Catalan, Galician and Basque, though not official languages, can be in the communication of the citizens with the Council of the European Union, the Commission, the Economic and Social Committee, the European Parliament and the European Ombudsman, as well as in the workings of the Committee of the Regions. Though regional and minorities languages can benefit from European Union programmes, protection of linguistic rights is a matter for the member states.

A wide variety of languages from other parts of the world are spoken by immigrant communities in EU countries. Turkish is spoken as a first language by an estimated 2% of the population in Belgium and the western part of Germany and by 1% in The Netherlands. Other widely-used migrant languages include Maghreb Arabic (mainly in France and Belgium), Urdu, Bengali and Hindi spoken by immigrants from the Indian sub-continent in the United Kingdom, while Balkan languages are spoken in many parts of the EU by migrants and refugees who have left the region as a result of the Yugoslav wars. Many immigrant communities in the EU have been in place for several generations now and their members are bilingual, at ease both in the local language and in that of their community. Migrant languages are not given formal status or recognition in the EU or in the EU countries and they are not covered by EU language-teaching programmes.

Proposed structure for Languages of the European Union

 * Lead

Decriptive part - the sociolinguistic situation
 * Language skills of European Union citizens
 * Regional and Minority Languages
 * Romani [non territorial]
 * Yiddish [non territorial]
 * Russian
 * Migrant languages
 * Linguistic classification of the EU official languages

the EU language "policy"


 * Legal basis [The treaties + the Charter + the "Constitution"]
 * Official languages of the European Union
 * Maltese
 * Irish
 * Status of Regional and Minority languages
 * Catalan, Galician, and Basque
 * Welsh and Scottish Gaelic
 * Provision in the proposed constitutional treaty
 * Migrant languages
 * National sign languages in the European Union
 * EU initiatives for language learning and linguistic diversity

Links section
 * See also
 * References
 * Further reading
 * External links