The European Union (EU) has 24 official languages, of which the three most natively spoken ones are German, French and Italian. Previously, English, French and German were considered "procedural" languages, but this notion was abandoned by the European Commission, whereas the European Parliament accepts all official languages as working languages. Today, English and French are used in the day-to-day workings of the institutions of the EU. Institutions have the right to define the linguistic regime of their working, but the Commission and a number of other institutions have not done so, as indicated by several judicial rulings.
The EU asserts that it is in favour of linguistic diversity. This principle is enshrined in Article 22 of the Charter of Fundamental Rights (art. 22) and in the Treaty on European Union (art. 3(3) TEU). In the EU, language policy is the responsibility of member states, and the EU does not have a common language policy; EU institutions play a supporting role in this field, based on the principle of "subsidiarity"; they promote a European dimension in the member states' language policies. The EU encourages all its citizens to be multilingual; specifically, it encourages them to be able to speak two languages in addition to their native language. Though the EU has very limited influence in this area, as the content of educational systems is the responsibility of individual member states, a number of EU funding programmes actively promote language learning and linguistic diversity.
All 24 official languages of the EU are accepted as working languages, but in practice only threeEnglish, French, and Germanare in wide general use in its institutions, and of these, English is the most commonly used.European parliament has 24 official languages, but MEPs prefer English, theguardian 21 May 2014English will remain the working language of the EU after Brexit, The Irish Times 18 July 2016English will not be an official EU language after Brexit, says senior MEP, Politico Europe 27 June 2016Britain is leaving the EU, but its language will stay, The Economist 13 May 2017 The most widely understood language in the EU is English, which is understood by 44% of all adults, while German is the most widely used mother tongue, spoken by 18%. French is an official language in all three of the cities that are political centres of the EU: Brussels, Strasbourg, and Luxembourg City. Since the exit of the United Kingdom from the EU in 2020, the government of France has encouraged greater use of French as a working language.
Luxembourgish and Turkish, which have official status in Luxembourg and Cyprus, respectively, are the only two official languages of EU member states that are not official languages of the EU. In 2023, the Spanish government requested that its co-official languages Catalan, Basque, and Galician be added to the official languages of the EU.
Official EU languages , the official languages of the European Union, as stipulated in the latest amendment of Regulation No 1 determining the languages to be used by the European Economic Community of 1958, are:
Language Official in (de jure or de facto) Since At national level At subnational level Bulgarian Bulgaria 2007 Croatian Croatia AustriaHungaryItaly 2013 Czech Czechia Slovakia 2004 Danish Denmark Germany 1973 Dutch Belgium Netherlands 1958 English Ireland Malta United Kingdom (until 31 December 2020) 1973 Estonian Estonia 2004 Finnish Finland 1995 French Belgium France Luxembourg Italy 1958 German Austria Belgium Germany Luxembourg Denmark Italy Poland 1958 Greek Cyprus Greece 1981 Hungarian Hungary Austria Romania Slovakia Slovenia Croatia 2004 Irish Ireland 2007 Italian Italy CroatiaSlovenia 1958 Latvian Latvia 2004 Lithuanian Lithuania Poland 2004 Maltese Malta 2004 Polish Poland 2004 Portuguese Portugal 1986 Romanian Romania 2007 Slovak Slovakia 2004 Slovene Slovenia Austria Hungary Italy 2004 Spanish Spain 1986 Swedish Finland Sweden 1995
The number of member states (27) exceeds the number of official languages (24), as three member states (Austria, Belgium and Luxembourg) did not have a distinct national official language when they joined the EEC, but rather shared their closest neighbours': Austria's was (and still is) German; Belgium's were (and still are) Dutch, French and German; and Luxembourg's were French and German. Luxembourgish became a national official language of Luxembourg in 1984 (decades after the country joined the European Communities as a founding member). Despite this, Luxembourg has not since requested its designation as an EU official language. Cyprus has two official languages, Greek and Turkish, but only Greek is an official language of the EU, shared by Greece. Conversely, the United Kingdom withdrew from the EU in 2020, but the English language remains as it is official in Ireland (besides Irish) and in Malta (besides Maltese). Therefore, 23 of the 27 EU states have 24 official languages, and the remaining 4 do not contribute any additional official languages.
Several national languages are shared by two or more countries in the EU. Dutch, English, French, German, Greek, and Swedish are all official languages at the national level in multiple countries (see table above). In addition, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Hungarian, Italian, Slovak, and Slovene are official languages in multiple EU countries at the regional level.
Furthermore, not all national languages have been accorded the status of official EU languages. These include Luxembourgish, an official language of Luxembourg since 1984, and Turkish, an official language of Cyprus.
All languages of the EU are also working languages. Documents which a member state or a person subject to the jurisdiction of a member state sends to institutions of the Community may be drafted in any one of the official languages selected by the sender. The reply is drafted in the same language. Regulations and other documents of general application are drafted in the twenty-four official languages. The Official Journal of the European Union is published in the twenty-four official languages.
Documents of major public importance or interest are produced in all 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 (sometimes called "procedural languages"), 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.Europa:Languages and Europe. FAQ: Is every document generated by the EU translated into all the official languages?, Europa portal. Retrieved 6 February 2007. Non-institutional EU bodies are not legally obliged to make language arrangement for all the 24 languages (Kik v. Office for Harmonization in the Internal Market, Case C-361/01 , 2003 ECJ I-8283).
The translations are expensive. According to the EU's English-language website,Europa:Languages and Europe. FAQ: What does the EU's policy of multilingualism cost?, Europa portal. Retrieved 6 February 2007. the cost of maintaining the institutions’ policy of multilingualism—i.e., the cost of translation and interpretation—was €1,123 million in 2005, which is 1% of the annual general budget of the EU, or €2.28 per person per year. The EU Parliament has made clear that its member states have autonomy for language education, which by treaty the Union must respect.
Language families
The vast majority of the 24 official EU languages belong to the Indo-European family: the three dominant subfamilies are the Germanic, Romance, and Slavic. Germanic languages are primarily spoken in central and northern Europe and include Danish, Dutch, English, German, and Swedish. Romance languages are mostly spoken in western and southern European regions; they include French, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian, and Spanish. The Slavic languages are predominantly found in central Europe and the Balkans in southeastern Europe; they include Bulgarian, Croatian, Czech, Polish, Slovak, and Slovene. The Baltic languages, Latvian and Lithuanian; the Celtic languages, including Irish; and Greek are also Indo-European.
Outside the Indo-European family, Estonian, Finnish, and Hungarian are Uralic languages, while Maltese is the only Afroasiatic language with official status in the EU.
Writing systems
Most official EU languages are written in the Latin script. The two exceptions are Greek, which is written in the Greek script, and Bulgarian, which is written in Cyrillic script. With the accession of Bulgaria to the European Union on 1 January 2007, Cyrillic became the third official script of the European Union, following the Latin and Greek scripts. The original design of euro banknotes had the word euro written in both Latin (Euro) and Greek (Ευρώ) letters; the Cyrillic spelling (Eвро) was added to the new Europa series of banknotes starting in 2013 (see Linguistic issues concerning the euro).
Language-specific regulations English
After the United Kingdom's withrawal from the EU the number of native English speakers among EU citizens fell from approximately 13% to just 1%. This dramatic demographic shift created a paradox: English lost its primary native base within the Union, yet it has remained — and arguably consolidated itself as — the dominant working language of EU institutions.
This event consolidated a preexistent phenomenon: the emergence of recurrent linguistic features, lexical, grammatical, and pragmatic, in the English used within European institutional and professional contexts, shaped by contact with other European languages and by the relative absence of native-speaker normative pressure. This concept is called Euro-English.
Maltese Although Maltese is an official language, the Council set a transitional period of three years from 1 May 2004, during which the institutions were not obliged to draft all acts in Maltese. It was agreed that the council could extend this transitional period by an additional year, but decided not to. All new acts of the institutions were required to be adopted and published in Maltese from 30 April 2007.
Irish
Irish previously had the status of "treaty language" before being upgraded to an official and working language in 2007. However, a temporary derogation was enforced until 1 January 2022. The designation of Irish as a "treaty language" meant that only the treaties of the European Union were translated into Irish, whereas Legal Acts of the European Union adopted under the treaties (like Directives and Regulations) did not have to be.
When Ireland joined the European Communities (now the EU) in 1973, Irish was accorded "Treaty Language" status. This meant that the founding EU Treaty was restated in Irish. Irish was also listed in that treaty and all subsequent EU treaties as one of the authentic languages of the treaties. As a Treaty Language, Irish was an official procedural language of the Court of Justice of the European Union.Deirdre Fottrell, Bill Bowring – 1999 Minority and Group Rights in the New Millennium. It was also possible to correspond in written Irish with the EU Institutions.