Languages of the European Union

Among many languages and dialects used in the EU, it has 23 official and working languages: Bulgarian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Irish, Latvian, Lithuanian, Maltese, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Slovak, Slovene, Spanish, and Swedish. All important documents, such as legislation¹, are translated into every official language. The European Parliament provides translation into all languages for documents and its plenary sessions. Some institutions use only a few languages as internal working languages. Language policy is the responsibility of member states, but EU institutions promote² the learning of other languages.

German is the most widely spoken mother tongue and there are about 18% of native speakers, that is, 88.7 million people, living in the European Union. German is followed by English (13%), Italian (13%) and French (12%). However, nowadays English is the most widely spoken foreign language of over half (51%) the population, while German is spoken by 32% and French by 26% population. Moreover, it has been found that 56% of European citizens are able to speak a language other than their mother tongue. Most official languages of the EU belong to the Indo-European language family, except Estonian, Finnish, and Hungarian, and Maltese. Most EU official languages are written in the Latin alphabet except Bulgarian, written in Cyrillic, and Greek, written in the Greek alphabet.

Besides the 23 official languages, there are about 150 regional and minority languages, spoken by up to 50 million people. Of these, only the Spanish regional languages (Catalan/Valencian, Basque and Galician), Scottish Gaelic and Welsh can be used by citizens in communication with the main European institutions. Although EU programmes can support regional and minority languages, the protection of linguistic rights is provided by the individual member states.