Linguae Europaeae

by Yinglun Sun Yinglun Sun is a doctoral student in Linguistics at the University of Illinois. She uses quantitative and corpus methods to uncover patterns in human language production, and is particularly interested in the interactional nature of language use. She wrote this blog post for 418 “Languages and Minorities in Europe” in Spring 2023. One of the fundamental values of the European Union (EU) is the observance and respect of linguistic diversity. This is reflected by regulations that define 24 official languages for the EU, and provisions for the right of EU citizens to write to any of the institutions or bodies of the EU in one of these official languages, and to receive an answer in the same language. In addition, the major institutions of the European Union – such as the European Parliament, the Court of Justice of the EU, the European Council, the European Commission, and the European Central Bank – all operate at some level of multilingualism in their written communicatio...

by Mike Nelson I will begin with a riddle. Most people know the famous phrase “a dime a dozen.” Keeping that phrase in mind, the European Union will soon have twenty cents. What is the meaning of this riddle? A plaque in Croatian The answer is twenty-four official languages. When Croatia joins the EU on July 1, 2013, Croatian will become the twenty-fourth official language. Croatia is the first country to accede to the EU since Bulgaria and Romania in 2007. With two dozen official languages, there are many questions regarding the efficiency and practicality of so many languages, as well as the expense. In particular, there was a tense debate on whether or not Croatian should become an EU official language. According to an article in EU Observer , the main concern of adopting Croatian as an official language is the similarity between the various Western Balkan languages. Augustin Palokaj, the author of the article, notes that the United Nation's International Criminal Tribu...