Three new languages added to the official EU list
Over 200 languages are spoken all across Europe - 23 of them are now official EU languages (Photo: wikipedia)
HELENA SPONGENBERG
03.01.2007 @ 09:30 CET
EUOBSERVER / BRUSSELS – Having just rung in the new year, the European Union has not only become bigger but it has also become three languages richer, bringing the Cyrillic alphabet, another Latin language and the first Celtic one as an EU official language, into the 27-nation bloc.
Bulgarian, Irish and Romanian on Monday (1 January) became the three new official languages of the EU - raising the number to 23.
"The diversity of languages is our common richness," said EU culture commissioner Jan Figel in one of his last statements in December before handing over part of his portfolio to the new EU multilingualism commissioner from Romania, Leonard Orban.
The union annually spends some €1.1 billion on translation and interpretation – around 1 percent of the EU budget a year – with only a slight increase in cost expected for the three new languages.
This pays for almost 3,000 staff to interpret around 11,000 meetings a year and to translate more than 1.3 million pages of text.
Slavic and Latin roots
With Bulgarian, Cyrillic has become the third official alphabet of the EU – the two others are the Latin and the Greek alphabet.
The Cyrillic script - also used in the Russian language – was developed in the 10th century and named after St Cyril, a ninth-century Byzantine monk.
Most of the letters were borrowed from the Greek alphabet mixed with letters from an older Glagolitic alphabet.
Bulgarian is closely related to Macedonian and is spoken by almost ten million people with nearly eight million of them living in Bulgaria.
Romanian, on the other hand, is a Latin language and has only periodically been written in Cyrillic when forced by external powers over 100 years ago.
Out of the four Latin languages already officially represented the EU, it is closest to Italian – although speakers of Romanian seem to understand Italian more easily than the other way round.
Romanian is spoken by between 24-26 million people with 22 million of them living in Romania and most of the remaining people living in neighbouring Moldova.
While French, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish were influenced by the Germanic languages spoken in northern Europe, Romanian was influenced by the Greek, Hungarian, Slavonic and Turkish languages - distinguishing it from the other Romance languages.
Irish derogation
The third language – Irish – will be the first Celtic language officially within the EU but not everything will be translated into the language which is spoken on a daily basis by only around 5 percent of the 4-million-strong Irish population.
When Ireland joined the then European Economic Community in 1973 - which was a 9-member club at the time - Irish was given special status since it is one of the country's two official languages.
But pressure to exercise these rights only grew in 2004 when asserting the Irish language and cultural identity became more important in a growing union – now at 27 member states.
Under a derogation proposed by the Irish government in 2005, only laws adopted jointly by the European Parliament and EU member states will be translated into Irish, with ways of extending this to other legislation to be looked at five years down the line.
Scottish and Welsh, also Celtic languages, are not official EU languages although they are spoken in the UK, an EU member. Welsh speakers, however, are also stepping up demands for recognition of their native tongue in the EU.
Meanwhile, Catalan, Valencian, Basque and Galician-speakers who fought to get EU-level recognition of their language have been unable to get the same deal as the Irish because they qualify as official languages only in parts of Spain and not throughout the country.
Instead, they have had to settle for the right for their citizens to correspond with European institutions in their own language. Documents will also be translated at the expense of the Madrid government.
