Official, yet absent
Irish in the European Union's digital services after the end of the derogation
This event is part of a demonstration of what Lera offers for running knowledge events. Its content is written with care and draws on real sources, but the conference has not taken place, and apart from the convener its participants are fictional.
Irish has been a treaty language of the European Communities since 1973 and an official and working language of the European Union since 2007, but until the end of 2021 it lived with a "temporary derogation": the institutions were not obliged to publish every document in Irish. On the first day of 2022 the derogation ended and Irish became, in the Commission's words, equal to the other twenty-three official languages.
This poster asks what equality means in practice. We examined a large number of the portals, online forms and digital services that a European citizen visits in order to work, study or file a complaint. The text of the law now exists in Irish, but most of the places where citizens actually deal with the Union either have no Irish at all or have an incomplete machine version for which no one takes responsibility. The language right has reached the text of the law; it has not reached the registration form.
If this is the state of a language with so much political backing, the position of the languages that have no place in the Union's language regime is clear. Official status without infrastructure becomes a ceremonial badge. We propose that every European digital service publish, next to its accessibility statement, a language statement: what is available in which language, who wrote or reviewed it, and what is still missing.
Findings
- Legal texts are published in Irish, but the interfaces of most widely used digital services still offer no Irish.
- Where Irish does appear, it is often machine translation with no human review and no indication of its origin.
- There is no public mechanism through which citizens can report the absence of their language and receive an answer.
References
Council Regulation (EU) 2015/2264 of 3 December 2015 extending and phasing out the temporary derogation measures from Regulation No 1 of 15 April 1958 determining the languages to be used by the European Economic Community and Regulation No 1 of 15 April 1958 determining the languages to be used by the European Atomic Energy Community introduced by Regulation (EC) No 920/2005.
European Commission. 2022. "Irish now on the same level as other official EU languages." News, 3 January 2022.
Council Regulation (EC) No 920/2005 of 13 June 2005 amending Regulation No 1 of 15 April 1958 … and introducing temporary derogation measures from those Regulations.