Now English is de rigueur in Brussels Babel
AT A European Union news conference last month, the names of the 20 languages into which questions and answers would be translated shone in red lights on a noticeboard, like flight departures to exotic places. At the top, the mundane English, French and German; at the bottom, Lithuanian, Hungarian and Slovenian.
As the union has grown, so, too, has the number of its official languages. One side-effect is that English is emerging increasingly as the union’s lingua franca, much to the chagrin of the French, once the guardians of the group’s foremost tongue.
Britain was not among the founding nations when the union was born in the 1950s, and French was the accepted language of diplomacy and international affairs.
When Britain did join, in 1973, President Georges Pompidou of France elicited a commitment from London that all civil servants sent to work at the union’s capital in Brussels would be fluent French speakers - and they are to this day.
“The weight of English grows each year,” said Nicolas de la Grandville, the spokesman for the French permanent delegation. The scales tipped further in favour of English in 1995, he said, with the entrance of Sweden, Finland and Austria, where English, not French, is the common second language.
This month, Bulgaria and Romania entered the union, and Gaelic will be recognised as one of Ireland’s official languages, alongside English. With Bulgaria’s entry another alphabet, Cyrillic, will go into use. Spain has obtained the right to have the regional languages Basque, Catalan and Galician recognised as “semi-official” languages.
This will bring the number of official union languages to 23 which means that all official documents, including 90,000 pages of past treaties and agreements, will have to be translated into all those languages.
The cost of this Babel of different tongues is immense: the union budgets 1bn (673m) a year and employs about 3,000 people for translating. Little wonder, then, that most officials and others working here tend to use English for ease.
Last year, when a French business leader, Ernst-Antoine Seillire, addressed a gathering of European leaders in Brussels, he announced that he would speak in English, “the language of business”. The French president, Jacques Chirac, jumped to his feet and stormed out, his entourage of government ministers in tow.
Indeed, the French have begun offering a programme of free French classes for union officials in Brussels and for more senior bureaucrats at Avignon, in the sunny south of France.
“We have about 500 in Brussels alone, though we cannot yet tell what the long-range effect will be,” said Marc-Olivier Gendry, who is responsible at the French delegation for reinforcing the French presence. France has budgeted about 2m (1.35m) for the classes.
This month, a new EU commissioner will take over, responsible for languages alone, reflecting the importance the union places on language.
But Vincent, who is French, is an example of the spread of English. Among his colleagues, he said, are a Slovak, an Italian, a German and an Englishman. “I speak French with the Italian, whose French is perfect,” he said. “But when the others are together, we speak English, though they all speak some French.”
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