On Tuesday 19 September in Brussels, the ‘General Affairs’ Council may examine the Spanish government’s official request for recognition of the Catalan, Basque and Galician languages as official languages of the European Union.
On Thursday 17 August, the Spanish authorities sent a letter to the Presidency of the EU Council, i.e. Spain itself, formally asking the Member States to add Spain’s three regional languages to the EU’s language regime.
On the same day, the Spanish Minister for Foreign Affairs, José Manuel Albares, indicated that Madrid had consulted the legal services of the European Commission and the Council of the EU to ensure the legal viability of such a procedure. He confirmed that this initiative was one of the measures taken by the outgoing ‘Sánchez’ government to win the support of Catalan separatists with a view to forming a new government led by Pedro Sánchez with a sufficient parliamentary majority after the early general elections on 23 July.
The EU’s language regime is based on Regulation 1/1958, the first regulation adopted by the European Communities and since amended to include the current 24 official languages of the EU. The Croatian language was the last to be included in the language regime when Croatia joined the EU in 2013. Any amendment to this regulation requires the unanimous agreement of the Member States. Some of them may be reluctant to approve the Spanish application because of the additional translation and interpretation costs involved.
See the regulation governing the EU’s language regime: https://aeur.eu/f/8bn
Since ‘Brexit’, English, the essential working language of the European institutions, has not been removed from the European language regime. During the negotiations on their accession to the EU, Malta and Ireland, which both use English as their official national language, requested that Maltese and Gaelic be granted official language status, as English was already an official language of the EU with the presence of the United Kingdom.
Nevertheless, it took fifteen years for Gaelic to end the derogation agreement limiting the quantity of documents translated into Irish due to a shortage of translation staff (see EUROPE 12860/13). Ireland also covered a substantial part of the translation and translator training costs.
In June 2005, the ‘General Affairs’ Council adopted conclusions aimed at facilitating exchanges between European citizens and the EU institutions in a regional language which is recognised by the Constitution of a Member State, but not as an official or working language of the EU (see EUROPE 8970/28). This includes the following interactions: publicising the acquis communautaire, oral interventions during meetings of the EU Council and the European Parliament, and written correspondence between citizens and the European institutions. These initiatives are at the financial expense of the Member State concerned.
See conclusions (page 14): https://aeur.eu/f/8bq (Original version in French by Mathieu Bion)