• Frank
• Jul 14,2008
• In: News

The Italian language police

Silvio Berlusconi, the intractable, obstinate and stupid Italian prime minister, has thrown a tantrum over the fact that EU meetings use the languages that most Europeans speak, not Italian. He has “advised his ministers to walk out of EU meetings in which they are forced to speak another language, and boycott those for which there is no documentation available in Italian,” writes Certain Ideas of Europe (hat tip).

He is protesting the use of “working” or “procedural” languages, i.e., English, French and German, although the idea makes a lot of sense. Wikipedia tells me that English speaking countries (the UK and Ireland) make up 13% of the EU’s population; French speaking countries (France, Luxembourg and the Wallonia region of Belgium) make up 14%; and German speaking countries (Germany and Austria) make up 18%. Thus countries speaking the working languages make up almost half (45%) of the EU population, plus the fact that English is huge as a second language, so that it’s safe to venture that a majority of Europeans have command of at least one of the working languages. Thus in an area with 27 different nations, and 23 official languages (really 22, since Gaelic’s just for show) it makes sense to use a limited set of core languages that most people know, so that EU politicians and bureaucrats don’t have to know 22 languages, many of which (Bulgarian? Latvian? Finnish?) are only useful in one country, as opposed to several.

What I would prefer to see, as a Eurosceptic from afar of sorts, is a disbandment of the Union entirely so that everyone can get back to free trade in whatever language they’d like. That’s highly unlikely, though, so I’m not counting on it.