English Will Not Be an Official EU Language After Brexit*
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.
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.
“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.
Source: Politico.eu
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