English
will not be an official EU language after Brexit, says senior MEP
No other EU country has
English as their official language and so it could lose its status.
By HORTENSE GOULARD
6/27/16, 5:47 PM CET Updated 10/23/16, 6:47 PM CET
Danuta Hübner, the
head of the European Parliament’s Constitutional Affairs Committee
(AFCO), warned Monday that English will not be one of the European
Union’s official languages after Britain leaves the EU.
English is one of
the EU’s 24 official languages because the U.K. identified it as
its own official language, Hübner said. But as soon as Britain
completes the process to leave the EU, English could lose its status.
“We have a
regulation … where every EU country has the right to notify one
official language,” Hübner said. “The Irish have notified
Gaelic, and the Maltese have notified Maltese, so you have only the
U.K. notifying English.”
“If we don’t
have the U.K., we don’t have English,” Hübner said.
English is one of
the working languages in the European institutions, Hübner said,
adding: “It’s actually the dominating language,” the one most
frequently used by EU civil servants.
The regulation
listing official languages of the EU would have to be changed
unanimously by remaining countries if they want to keep English as an
official language, Hübner said.
However, an EU
source explained that the regulations governing official languages
are themselves subject to more than one translation. The 1958
regulation regarding the official languages of the EU, which was
originally written in French, does not say clearly whether a member
country — Ireland or Malta for instance — can have more than one
official language, an EU source said. Interpretations of the French
wording tend to conclude that this might be possible, whereas the
English version appears to rule this out.
When Ireland and
Malta joined the EU, English was already an official language, which
is why the two countries asked for Irish and Maltese to be added to
the list.
“If a member state
has more than one official language, the language to be used shall,
at the request of such state, be governed by the general rules of its
law,” the regulation says.
“The rules
governing the languages of the EU institutions shall be determined by
the Council, acting unanimously by means of a regulation,” a
European Commission spokesperson said, adding the rules “have been
amended several times to take account of the different enlargements.”
The Commission has
already started using French and German more often in its external
communications, as a symbolic move after Britain voted to leave the
EU last Thursday, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Meanwhile, the
president of the regional council of Tuscany, Eugenio Giani, called
for Italian to become one of the official languages of the EU. “We
have not defended … our language as we should have, both on the
European continent and in the world,” Giani said following the
British referendum result.
This article has
been updated with additional reporting.
Authors:
Hortense Goulard
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