MERCATOR :: News

May 2004

EU ENLARGEMENT INTRODUCES NINE NEW OFFICIAL LANGUAGES BUT MANY MORE MINORITISED ONES STILL HAVE NO RECOGNITION

May 2004 – The historical enlargement of the EU to ten new Member States, effective since 1 May, has radically changed the EU’s linguistic regime, while it has also raised many questions as to the future of the much more numerous minoritised languages in both the old and the new EU Member States, which lack ‘official’ or ‘working language’ status. The new EU languages are Czech, Estonian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Hungarian, Maltese, Polish, Slovak and Slovenian; in the case of Cyprus, its accession has not entailed any linguistic novelty, as Greek was already official. The reason why all these languages have become official and working languages of the EU is by virtue of their being recognised as an official language “in one or more of the Member States”, according to the regulation determining the languages to be used. However, in practice this criterion has been interpreted in a restrictive way, since up to now only state languages have been admitted (for specific reasons, the Irish and Luxembourgish languages are an exception to this rule), although nowhere is it stated that they have to be official throughout the territory of a Member State. In this sense, as reported by Mercator-Legislation in April, there is some hope that Catalan (official only in a part of the territory of the Spanish State) be given a certain degree of officiality, as a ‘Treaty language’. As regards the minoritised languages in the new Member States, their number may vary depending on the sources, but a possible estimate could be around 34, some of them even in an endangered or extremely endangered situation, while the total number of speakers could near 10 million. Despite the fact that some of these minoritised languages are also state languages in their kin-states and therefore they already enjoy EU official status, most them enjoy no official status at all because they are not state languages in any Member State. Out of these, especially outstanding is the case of Romany, as it is the only language spoken in almost every EU Member State while at the same time it has absolutely no recognition. Moreover, some languages also enjoy the status of a state language in other non-EU states, such as Russian or Ukrainian. For the current situation of the new Member States as regards their linguistic legislation as well as the signature and ratification of the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages and the Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities, see Mercator-Legislation’s new web section: “Languages and Legislation”.