At the General Affairs Council on Tuesday 19 September, European Ministers will examine a Spanish request to amend Regulation 1/1958 to include Catalan, Basque and Galician in the EU’s language regime. However, no vote will be taken at this Council meeting.
This Regulation determines the language regime to be used in the European Economic Community.
To be validated, this request must be approved unanimously by the EU Council, which seems highly unlikely at this stage. A number of Member States fear that the Spanish initiative, if it comes to fruition, could snowball, given that 8% of EU citizens belong to a minority that defends the use of its own language. At the meeting of Member States’ ambassadors to the EU (Coreper) on Friday 15 September, some national delegations stressed that such a request raised legal, administrative and budgetary issues that needed to be carefully examined before any decision was taken.
The inclusion of Catalan, Basque and Galician as official languages of the EU is part of a series of concessions made by the Spanish Socialists in order to win enough support to form a government - in particular the support of the Catalan separatists parties Junts per Catalunya (JxCat/NI) and Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya (ERC/GreensEFA).
Sweden is the first country to publicly express its concerns. “We believe that the legal and financial consequences of the proposal need to be investigated further”, said the Swedish government in a statement. “There are many minority languages that are not official languages of the EU”, say the Swedes.
The Spanish government’s haste is a common concern among Member States, who are seeking to carefully understand the operational implications of adding languages - particularly the costs - before taking a position.
“We are not considering the possibility of not approving this official status for Catalan in Europe”, the Catalan Minister for the Presidency, Laura Vilagrà i Pons, told the press on Wednesday 13 September.
She played down concerns about costs, arguing that translation services represent a very small part of the EU budget. “The improvement in machine translation tools and artificial intelligence suggests that translation costs will be significantly reduced in the coming years”, she added.
Defending the language rights of millions of Europeans should not be an economic discussion, according to the Minister. In 2022, the EU spent 0.2% of its budget on translations (€355 million), or €0.81 per capita.
“The specific cost and the way in which it will be applied will depend on the memorandum to be presented by the Spanish government, in accordance with European regulations. We have yet to see how the proposal will be put into practice”, according to the Minister.
On 17 August, the Spanish Government asked the Presidency of the Council of the EU to initiate the procedures for amending the Regulation determining the language regime in the EU to include Basque, Catalan and Galician (see EUROPE 13234/4).
Link to the document for the EU Council: https://aeur.eu/f/8lk (Original version in French by Lionel Changeur)