Language shapes cultural identity and bonds political communities. In Western European states such as Belgium and Switzerland distinct linguistic communities are given political representation. In other regions minority linguistic groups, such as in the Basque Country in Spain or Wales in the United Kingdom, campaign for linguistic and political rights.
The European Union (EU) brings together 25 member states and a total of 20 official languages: Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Maltese, Polish, Portuguese, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish and Swedish. The main working languages of the EU are English, French and German. However, the EU treaties recognize the importance of respecting language as part of member states’ identities and of preserving cultural diversity. Each member state has the right to state which language will be its official language. To ensure democracy the EU guarantees that all official documents are translated into all combinations of languages.
EU citizens have the right to correspond with EU institutions in the official language of their member state. To achieve these aims all official documents are translated into all languages and, at meetings of the European Parliament and the European Council, interpretation between all languages is arranged. With 20 official languages this means that there are, theoretically, 380 combinations of languages to translate or interpret. The European Commission’s Directorate-Generals for Translation (DGT) and Interpretation (DG-SCIC) provide the linguistic services to make this possible. The cost of EU linguistic services with 11 languages prior to enlargement in 2004 was €2 per citizen per year. This figure is set to rise following the accession of 10 new member states—and nine new languages—on 1 May 2004.
With the increase in the number of member states and official languages in 2004, several existing member states launched campaigns to obtain recognition of their minority languages as official EU languages. Ireland is campaigning to obtain such recognition for Irish, and Spain for Catalan, Basque and Galician to be granted that status. The Welsh nationalist party, Plaid Cymru, announced in September 2004 that it will seek to obtain recognition of Welsh as an official language, claiming that more EU citizens speak Welsh than Maltese.
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