Brussels, 02/08/2001 (Agence Europe) - As we have pointed out, European civil servant Anna Maria Campogrande has raised the problem of the dominance of English in the European institutions in a letter to president Prodi. "As things stand, it is necessary and urgent to think about a code of good practice for languages, not only for the Commission and other European institutions, but also for Member States", says Mme Campogrande, for whome Europeans, if they want "to stay together, must study the languages of the Member States, and not just the easiest ones, but also and especially the most difficult ones (…), in a spirit of reciprocity". In her letter, Mme Campogrande begins by pointing out to the president of the Commission that "the oil slick of English has also spread to geography". She enclosed in the letter annexes showing that "the geography maps of Europe are now made only in English, even if there are eleven official languages and a lingua franca of the place where the Commission has its headquarters". And she says to Mr Prodi: "Italy with an IE, with its sixty million inhabitants (…) with its prestige and its function as a lingua franca throughout the Mediterranean, with its economic, political and cultural weight, has become Italy with a Y. Over time, if we let things go (…) you will become Valiantmen and I Greatfield (…). I would like to point out to you that even in the United Nations, where the official languages are rigorously spread and protected, English does not benefit from such dominance. And yet, here we are not in the United Nations but part of a context of integration (…). Mr president, the civil servants are weary of this stifling and constant evangelisation in English, beginning with information technology, by which those in charge of services constantly send technical messages in English which a large part of the staff do not understand very well. We have tried to protest but there has been no reply (…). There are services which require work to be done only in English. Who decided that? On what legal basis? Who decided, for example, that documents for negotiations with candidate countries are provided only in English?". Mme Campogrande also says to Mr Prodi: "Europe is not a continent on the way to being colonised by the English/(North) Americans. We are, by contrast, in the presence of occult and centrifugal forces which use the structure that Europe has given itself to carry out integration, in order to pursue other aims and interests which are in contradiction with European integration. Your responsibility is to put an end to this state of affairs that you cannot continue to ignore (…). We need to establish once and for all that English, in the context of the European institutions and further in the Member States, is a language like the others, certainly not more important than German, French and Italian, which are the languages of the three great founding states whose demographic, political, economic and cultural weight is at the basis of the European project" (see also EUROPE of 16/17 July, p.18, on the subject of Mr Copetti's appeal to set up a "permanent languages conference").