EUROPEAN LANGUAGE POLICY BETWEEN THEORY AND

PRACTICE

Vlado SušacUniversity of Zadar

What is a language?

• A system for encoding and decoding information (verbal language, sign language, animal language…)

• Language vs dialect– Linguistic or political criteria?• purely linguistic: dialect continuum• political-historical: standard languages

Dialect Continua of Europe

dialect continuum: a continuous range of dialects across a large geographical area withoutdefineable inner boundaries:

-West Romance-West Germanic- Scandinavian-South Slavic-North Slavic

Languages in Europe“Language is a dialect with an army and a navy”

Language Identity• intelligibility criterion:– 2 Scandinavian ‘languages’ (Continental, Insular)– 3 South Slavic ‘languages’ (West, Central, East)

• political and historical criterion:– 6 Scandinavian languages:

• Swedish, two standards of Norwegian, Danish• Icelandic, Faroese

– 7 South Slavic languages:• Slovenian, Croatian, Bosnian, Serbian, Montenegrian, Macedonian,

Bulgarian

Kinds of LanguagesState Languages

Languages having an official status throughout a country. State languages are alwaysofficial languages.

Official LanguagesLanguages used for legal and public administration purposes within a specified area of acountry or reaching over the whole state, such as Catalan in Spain.

Regional/Minority LanguagesLanguages traditionally used by part of the population of a state that are not dialects,artificially created or migrant languages, such as• Languages that are specific to a region like Breton in France• Languages that are spoken by a minority in a state but are official languages in other, usually bordering, country such as Hungarian in Slovakia• Non-territorial languages such as Yiddish and the language of Romani people

Non-indigenous languagesLanguages from other parts of the world spoken by immigrant communities in the EUsuch as Turkish in Germany or Indian languages in the United Kingdom

European Language Policy

• directed by two main political institutions:

– Council of Europe (Common European Framework of Reference for Languages: Learning, teaching, assessment, 2001)

– European Union

EU language policy - legal basisFundamentals:• TREATY OF ROME(1958)

– All languages are equally authentic (Art.314)– Citizens have a right to address the official EU bodies in any of the EU’s official

languages and to receive a reply in that language (Art.21)

• Council Regulation No 1 of 15/04/1958– Regulations and other documents of general application shall be drafted in the

official languages.– Option for EU institutions to stipulate languages to be used

• THE CHARTER OF FUNDAMENTAL RIGHTS OF THE UNION (2000)– Any discrimination based on language,… shall be prohibited (Art.21)– The Union shall respect cultural, religious and linguistic diversity (Art.22)

EU language policy - legal basis

Recent developments:-The European Year of Languages 2001 (‘unity in diversity’)

• A new framework strategy for multilingualism (2005)- main objective:

• multilingualism : a person’s ability to use several languages (mother tongue plus two languages )and the co-existence of different language communities in one geographical area.

Present situation

• The European Union has 23 official and working languages: Bulgarian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Irish, Italian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Maltese, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Slovak, Slovene, Spanish and Swedish.

Mission impossible?

23 languages = 506 language combinations

33 languages = 1 056 language combinations

Translating at the Commission From which languages?

13% 9%Other EU languages 3%6%German originals

47%French originals35%English originals12%Of which: freelance

1 762 773914 649Number of translated pages

20071992

The costs of translation & interpretation

• € 800 million for 2007 for translation (all institutions included).

• € 302 million for the Commission• € 195 million for interpretation

• = € 2,5 euros/citizen/year• (Less than 1% of the whole EU budget)

Croatian as 24th official language of the EU?

• Sporadic pleading for the ‘BCS’ (ICTY model) – cost reduction?

• EU practice: each country, before it joined, stipulated which language it wanted to have used as an official language for EU purposes. The agreement on this matter is then recorded in the Act of Accession.

• The European Personnel Selection Office (EPSO) has already recruited Croatian language interpreters, translators, and lawyer linguist for work in EU institutions

‘EUROBAROMETER 2006’ STATISTICS ON MULTILINGUALISM

Support for Principles

CONCLUSIONS• Europeans have reasonably good language skills

• 56% of Europeans speak a language other than their mother tongue;• 28% of respondents master two foreign languages;• 44% of EU citizens admit to not knowing any other languages than their native language;• Good language skills are perceived in relatively small Member States withseveral state languages, lesser used native languages or “language exchange” with neighbouring countries;• Those who live in southern European countries or countries where one of the major European languages is a state language appear to have moderate language skills;• Over half of the respondents consider that the level of their language skills

is better than basic. This is the case for 69% speaking English, 59% knowing German, 56% speaking Russian, 54% knowing French and 52% mastering Spanish;• A “multilingual” European is likely to be young, well-educated or still studying, born in a country other than the country of residence, who uses foreign languages for professional reasons and is motivated to learn.

Leap/Europe 2020 anticipations on language situation in Europe 2025

• Leap /E2020 ( European Laboratory of Political Anticipation) is an independent think tank established to analyze and anticipate global economic developments from a European perspective and to publish a paid-subscription monthly economic forecast bulletin

• five key factors that will shape the linguistic face of the European Union in a generation from now:– 1. The great return of German– 2. The revival of French– 3. The end of English (Anglo-American) as the hegemonic language of

modernity– 4. The entry of Russian into Europe's linguistic « purgatory »– 5. The growth of Spanish as an international language

THANK YOU!