European Parliament: what do they do for languages?

It's quite difficult to find out what the European Parliament does for improving multilingualism throughout the European Union (EU). It's easier to discover how many official languages there are: 24. The latest addition is Croatian, thanks to the latest country that became a member of the EU.

 © European Union 2015 - source:EP

A quick check on the Parliament's audiovisual library on the word 'language' results in a few videos and loads of pictures of conferences, meetings and so on. Anyway, one can argue that removing taxes on trade between Japan and the EU is good for language exchange. So is the Erasmus programme, as well as the Schengen agreement, so Europeans can move freely to another EU country.

One very interesting initiative though, is the so-called European Parliament Intergroup for Minorities, National Communities and Languages. Which is a very long title for some Parliamentarians joining NGO's to promote the issues of minorities. It exists since 1983, meets every month and has even a Facebook page. Check out the interview below with the chair of that group. According to him, one third of European citizens speak a minority language. Mind as well his Spanish accent in English - I personally love Spanish speaking English.

Interview with Jordi Sebastià. Chair of the European Parliament Intergroup for Minorities, National Communities and Languages from Centre Maurits Coppieters on Vimeo.

Another interesting point is the official EU languages: some non-official languages are more spoken than some official languages. Check them out (numbers are approximate speakers in the EU, not necessarily native ones, Turkish, Arabic and Tamil not included, source):

Bold ones are official EU languages:

1. Maltese (400 000) 
2. Luxembourgish (400 000)
3. Basque (600 000)
4. Welsh (750 000)
5. Irish (1 000 000) 
6. Estonian (1 200 000)
7. Russian (1 500 000)
8. Latvian (2 000 000) 
9. Galician (2 400 000)
10. Slovenian (2 500 000) 
11. Lithuanian (3 000 000)
12. Slovak (5 200 000)
13. Finnish (5 400 000) 
14. Danish (5 500 000)
15. Croatian (7 000 000) 
16. Catalan (9 000 000)

Very strange that Catalan is not an official language. That can only fuel the Catalans' hunger for independence. And the Maltese made quite a good deal with Europe, they managed to make their language official while there's 6 other languages with more speakers that didn't manage!

Also check out this study - a lot of data about Europeans and their languages.

Multilingual countries in Europe: who has the most official languages?

There's a difference between multilingual countries and multilingual persons. Some countries have more than one official language, but that doesn't mean that all the inhabitants speak all those languages. Multilingual persons are those that speak more than one language. There's many benefits to that, for example a better capacity to memorise.

Let's see which countries in Europe have more than one official language:

• In the north of Serbia, there's 'only' 7 official languages. Yes, 7. Serbian, Croatian, Romanian, Ruthanian, Hungarian, Slovak and Czech. One advantage: they're quite similar. No wonder so many Serbians are multilingual.

• Switzerland has 4 official languages: German, French, Italian and Romansh. However, the use depends on the different parts of Switzerland called cantons.

• Belgium, one of Europe's strangest countries when it comes to language arrangements, has three official languages: Dutch, French and surprisingly German. Dutch is mostly spoken in the north of the country and French in the south. German is spoken in the east region near Germany.

Official languages in Europe, copyright: public domain

• Luxembourg, the small country in between Belgium, Germany and France combines French, German and Luxembourgish. Many Luxembourgians are multilingual, and the three languages are official nation-wide, unlike Belgium.

• Belarus, Europe's last dictatorship, has two official languages: Russian and Belarusian.
• Cyprus, divided in two, has surprisingly both Turkish and Greek as official languages. That's because there were many Turkish living there before Turkey's invasion of 1974. However, in the Turkish part only Turkish is an official language.
• Finland's official languages are Finnish and Swedish, since there's quite a minority of Swedish persons living there.
• Ireland also has two official languages: Irish and English. Irish or Gaelic is also an official language of the European Union.
• Kosovo has Albanian and Serbian as official languages.
• Maltese nationals usually speak Maltese at home and English when studying at the University. They're both official languages, so it's easy for tourists to go there.
• The Netherlands have Dutch and Frisian as official languages. Frisian is spoken by half a million persons, and is one of the closest languages to English.

Interested? There's many more countries in Europe that grant certain rights to certain languages. Check them all out on Wikipedia.