Languages of the European Union

The EU Treaties are relatively silent about linguistic matters. The 1957 Treaty of Rome confines itself to delegating to the Council of Ministers the task of drafting rules governing the languages of the institutions. These rules, which were adopted in 1958, state that when a new country joins, its official language shall become an official and working language of the Community institutions.

These rules have been applied automatically upon each new accession. The linguistic arrangements apply in their entirety to the circulation of official documents, i.e. those adopted by the decision-making bodies, which are translated into the official language of each of the Member States prior to being circulated within them. They also apply, albeit in a variable way, to political representation on the Council (representatives of national governments) and to the Parliament.

Substantial resources are allocated to the language service. However, the linguistic rules do not apply to in-house communications, which are governed by rules of procedure that give preference to two chief vehicular languages, English and French. German is generally designated as a third language but is little used.

French continued to dominate in the internal communications of the institutions from their foundation in the 1950s until the mid-1970s. English was introduced as a vehicular language in the 1970s. However, French remained the main language until the early 1990s. Several studies carried out at that time stressed this French predominance (Fosty, 1985; Gehnen, 1991; Schlossmacher, 1994). The most commonly advanced reasons are that French was the language most common to the six founding countries (the official language in three of them, a widely taught foreign language in the others), that the United Kingdom was not a member of the Six and that the main institutions were situated in Brussels and Luxembourg. Factors such as the strong representation of French-speakers (Belgian, French and Luxembourger) in the administration and French investment in ensuring the continued use of French should not be overlooked. Within the institutions they like to speak of an "organisation culture" but no study has been done to analyse its nature. The organisation of the administration along French lines and the existence of a hierarchical authority partly based on the use of French may explain this continued dominance, but this is only theory.

The introduction of English as a vehicular language coincides more with the increasing influence it has exerted on international communication in Europe than with the accession of the United Kingdom and Ireland in 1973. English was initially used in sectors such as the economy, technology and science. Its share expanded gradually, slowly at first and then faster and faster from the end of the 1980s. The chief data available for assessing the trend are the proportions of primary texts (languages in which documents sent for translation were originally drafted) produced in each of the vehicular languages.

The case of the European Commission, the main producer of documents out of all the institutions (over a million pages per year), is the most revealing.

Languages of primary texts produced by the European Commission in %(Truchot 2001)

French	English	German	Other



38.5	44.7	5.1	11.7
40.4	45.3	5.4	8.9

This table shows the rise of English and the relative fall of French in written use over a 14-year period. In fact, during the 1980s and 1990s the factors favouring English continued to accumulate. Among them were the effects of internationalisation of the economy and of globalisation resulting in the use of English in the chief fields falling within EU competence, the spread of English teaching and the expansion in knowledge of the language, the training of new generations of diplomats and officials in American and British universities or in English-language faculties in Europe and the enlargement of the EU in 1995 to embrace countries where English is in common use.

It is conceivable that diplomats and officials who have a much better mastery of English than French have difficulty in accepting a power system where French occupies a substantial place and would prefer to replace it with another based on the preponderance of English. However, French is still very present, with a certain form of bilingualism appearing to be the rule in the institutions (Wright, 2000).

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The use of English as a supranational language in European institutions	\|	Supranational uses

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