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In the Holy Scripture, we learn that the tower of Babel triggered multilingualism as a divine sanction and as a means for dispersion and division (Genesis 11:1-9). Some centuries afterwards, Latin became a lingua franca in Western Europe, while Greek remained so in the Eastern part of our old continent.
The fall of both Roman Empires marked the official proliferation of vernacular tongues; and even the Roman Catholic Church abandoned its sacred language for the celebration of Mass after its Second Vatican Council in the 1960s, due to a radical reform that Pope Paul VI imposed and is polemic up to now.
In alignment with such similar Babelian trend, the European Union proclaims the principle of multilingualism in article 41, paragraph 4 of the Charter of Fundamental Rights, whereby nationals have the right to use any of the official languages to communicate with the EU institutions, and the institutions must reply in the same language. Yet English, French and German are considered working languages by its powerful centralistic institution, the European Commission, and are given thereby a status of priority; and English has de facto become the new lingua franca in the European Parliament, with most meetings and all technical meetings among advisors being held in such Germanic language.
One year ago, the Policy Department for Citizens’ Rights and Constitutional Affairs of the European Parliament published a study requested by its Committee on Petitions (PETI) entitled Linguistic and cultural diversity – Minority and minoritised languages as part of European linguistic and cultural diversity.
The thesis of the report is that the usage of so called “minority and minoritised languages” has decreased over the past three decades, marking an erosion of cultural diversity and even of presence of minorities in the Union.
Two case studies are presented: South Tyrol and the Ladin area, which intersect each other. The policy implemented in South Tyrol from 1972 is portrayed as a great success. The combination of German and Ladin with Italian in schools and the public administration allegedly shows a correlation with both a growth in general population and a growth in particular groups of people considered Germans, Ladins and others. However, the study does not possess specific data on Italians speaking either those two minority languages (German and Ladin) or any other language.
The European Union has 25 official state languages, and more than another 28 minority (stateless) languages. Minorities amount to 7% of the EU population. On top of those languages, both official state and minority languages, there is the “thorny” question of dialects, which are expressly excluded from protection by Article 1 of the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages (ratified by 16 Member States) and by various national regulations. In Spain, this is the case of Astur-Leonesian and Navarro-Aragonese. According to the study, Catalan is spoken by 9.8 million people in Spain while Spanish Basque-speakers amount to 677,000. The study forgets about the highlighting of Galician speakers data, which is rather surprising, being the third stateless language in Spain; it does explain in an annex that there are two million Galicians, of which one can assume that the majority speak Galician to some degree of competence.
Despite the study data on the number of Catalan and Basque-speakers, the text goes on to say that obtaining as accurate information as possible on the number of minority language speakers and their minority language competences is a conclusion that should be pursued.
Another conclusion is for EU agencies to contribute to fund special courses for adults to learn minority languages. However, so far such has not been a priority of EU agencies, but rather a competence left to public national authorities, in cooperation with private partners.
Source of image: Paul Marina Travel