Tuesday, June 14, 2005
Irish in BrusselsI've yet to be persuaded of the need for Irish to become an official and working language of the European Union. In a multilingual entity, linguistic compromises have to be made. Surely the fact that virtually everyone in Ireland has fluent English ought to make it reasonable we conduct our business with the EU through it.
Having said that, this report in todays Irish Times (sub. req.) goes a small way towards making the decision more palatable. Since the government has requested a "slimmed-down regime", not all documents are to be translated into Irish. The result is that the adoption of Irish will cost the EU €3.5 million a year, as opposed to around €46 million for each of the other 20 official languages.
In addition to the Irish move yesterday, three languages from Spain have also been recognised. Catalan, Basque and Galician received a different status which stops short of recognising them as official languages. As the EU Observer reports:
Under the agreement, citizens writing to the EU institutions will receive a reply in their own language as well as in Spanish, and EU legislation will be translated into these languages, although it will not have legal value in this version.The languages will now enjoy a status similar to that held by Irish until yesterday. In this case the Spanish government will pay translation costs, estimated to amount to €1.5 million per annum.
It may be useful to note that there are 6.5 million active speakers of Catalan, 580,000 speakers of Euskara (Basque), and 3 to 4 million speakers of Galego (Galician). 10,000 people use Irish as their principal spoken language.
POSTSCRIPT: A few people have question the figure for Irish speakers. See the comments for further details.
posted by Dick O'Brien at 8:52 AM | link |
--------------------
