Official, co-official, invisible
The hierarchy of Europe's languages, from Regulation No 1 to the Catalan request
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.
The European Union presents itself as a champion of multilingualism and offers its twenty-four official languages as proof. But that list grew out of a principle written on 15 April 1958 in Regulation No 1 of the European Economic Community: the official languages of the Community are the official languages of its member states. From its first day, then, European multilingualism has been the multilingualism of states, not of people. A language with no state behind it has no place in this system, however many speakers it has.
Catalan is the clearest example. It has more speakers than several official languages of the Union, such as Maltese or Estonian; it has a living university, publishing, media and literature; and in Spain it is a co-official language of several regions. Even so, when the Spanish government asked on 17 August 2023 for Catalan, Basque and Galician to become official languages of the Union, the General Affairs Council postponed the decision that September, and the file remains open. Changing the language regime requires the vote of every member state, and any one of them can stop it.
Below Catalan are languages that are not official even in their own country. The European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages, adopted by the Council of Europe in 1992, was meant as an instrument for these languages, yet several large countries, France among them, have never ratified it. And lowest of all are the languages of migrants: Arabic, Turkish, Persian, Tamazight, spoken by millions of Europeans and named in no document of the Union's language regime.
This hierarchy is reproduced in knowledge as well. European research programmes, databases and machine translation tools are built for the official languages and count the rest as "out of scope". My argument is that until Europe separates the official status of a language from the right to a language, its multilingualism will remain an organised form of the monolingualism of states. Phillipson (2003) warned that without an active policy this system would slide towards English only; what we see today confirms that warning.
Questions for discussion
- Could the Union grant rights to a language that no member state treats as its nationwide official language?
- Whom does the unanimity rule for changing the language regime protect, and whom does it leave out?
- How could Europe's research infrastructures bring the languages of migrants within their scope?
References
Council of the European Economic Community. 1958. Regulation No 1 determining the languages to be used by the European Economic Community. OJ 17, 6.10.1958, p. 385.
Council of Europe. 1992. European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. European Treaty Series No. 148.
Euronews. 2023. "Member states snub Pedro Sánchez's plan to turn Catalan, Galician and Basque into EU languages." 19 September 2023.
Phillipson, Robert. 2003. English-Only Europe? Challenging Language Policy. London: Routledge.