Together for Catalonia leader Carles Puigdemont at the European Parliament (Europa Press/Contact via ZUMA Press)
The Spanish government of Pedro Sánchez is asking for it for internal political reasons, but it seems unlikely that it will happen
Last week José Manuel Albares, the Spanish foreign minister, sent a letter to the Council of the European Union formally requesting the inclusion of Catalan, Galician and Basque among the official languages of the Union. The request is part of an agreement that Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez’s Socialist Party made in recent days with the Catalan independence party Junts per Catalunya (more simply called Junts) and which allowed the centre-left coalition led by Sánchez to elect the new president of the Spanish Chamber and to approach the possibility of forming a new government after last month’s elections.
The request for recognition for Catalan (and for the other Spanish regional languages) is an old claim of the pro-independence forces: the Sánchez government – which is still in office with reduced powers, waiting for the next executive to be appointed – has complied with it expeditiously to please Junts and its leader Carles Puigdemont, who after the July elections have become essential to achieve a majority in parliament and form a new government. However, the possibility of the European Union recognizing the Spanish regional languages as official languages is currently quite low.
In Spain, the only official language throughout the country is Castilian (that is, what we all define as Spanish), but the Constitution provides for the existence of so-called co-official languages, because they are to be considered official only in the regions where they are spoken, together with Castilian. Catalan is a co-official language in Catalonia, Basque in the Basque Country, Galician in Galicia and Aranese in the Val d’Aran.
– Read also: The ancient language of the Val d’Aran
For some time now, the separatists, especially the Catalan ones, would like their languages to be recognized as official languages of the European Union. The recognition requires, among other things, that all legal texts produced by the institutions are translated into that language, and that interpreters of that language are present at all meetings and public sessions. There are currently 24 official languages of the European Union: Bulgarian, Czech, Croatian, Danish, Estonian, Finnish, French, Greek, English, Irish, Italian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Maltese, Dutch, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Slovakian, Slovenian , Spanish, German, Swedish and Hungarian.
Multilingualism is a fundamental principle for the European Union. At the same time, the work of interpreters and translators within the institutions involves a considerable economic cost: it is estimated for example that every year the institutions produce 2.5 million pages of official documents, all of which must be translated into 24 languages. Overall, according to data from the European Commission, the annual cost of the institution’s multilingual regime amounts to around one billion euros.
– Read also: The life of interpreters in the European Parliament
Furthermore, Spain’s request to add Catalan, Galician and Basque as official languages is rather complicated to fulfill because it would imply a rather clear-cut political stance on the part of the European institutions, and could give the linguistic minorities of other countries the opportunity to advance claims similar. According to data from the European Parliament, about 8 percent of the population of the Union speaks a regional language or is part of a linguistic minority.
Above all, this request had already been refused some twenty years ago. In 2004 the government of the then Spanish Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, also a socialist like Pedro Sánchez, asked that the Spanish co-official languages be recognized by the European institutions, but the request was rejected, despite some minimal concessions from the Council.
The European Union currently has only those official languages among its official languages which are already the official language of a member country. Up to now, they have only been added when a new country joined the Union: for example, when Romania joined, Romanian became an official language. In the history of the European Union there is only one case in which the request of an already member country to add a new official language was accepted: it happened with Gaelic (i.e. the Irish language), which was included among the official languages in the 2007, even though the translation of the legal documents only started last year.
However, Gaelic is considered by the Irish Constitution as the “first official language” of the country, contrary to what happens with Catalan and the others, which in the Spanish legal system are only co-official languages.
The decision on the Spanish government’s request must be evaluated by the members of the Council and must be approved unanimously. It is not yet clear when it will be discussed, nor how the discussion will go. At the moment sources inside the Council they let it be known to the Spanish newspapers that they have received the request from the Spanish government, and that they will examine it soon, without giving further details.
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2023-08-24 12:58:16
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