“What do a Turkish olive grower, a Danish farmer, and an Irish fisherman have in common?” That sounds like the beginning of bad joke. But it was the question my father posed to me when I visited him in England a couple days after British voters decided to cut ties with the European Union.
His point was that the citizens of the 28 countries (soon to be 27) that make up the EU have very little in common culturally or economically, so it makes little sense to force them together in a confederation.
They don’t have much in common linguistically either, my dad added. “The EU spends tens of millions of euros a year on simultaneous translation at the EU Parliament in Brussels, for example translating Maltese to Danish or Estonian to Irish Gaelic.”
Accommodating so many languages — in the EU Parliament, in publications, on the Internet — has a far bigger price tag. The New York Times reports that the EU spends more than $1 billion a year for translation and interpretation.
It wasn’t always so difficult. When the EU’s predecessor was born in the 1950s, there were just six countries, and French or English were spoken in most of them. Now that the union has swollen to 28, there are 24 languages.
Some of the EU’s official languages, such as Irish Gaelic, are spoken by hardly anyone, anywhere. But that doesn’t matter. It’s all about diversity and language learning, say those who defend the practice. All official business needs translating from each language to each language.
That’s not 24 translators they need. That’s 24 translators for Gaelic, 24 for French, 24 for German, and so on. In all, there are 226 permutations.
Know someone who speaks both Maltese and Estonian? There might be one or two people in the world who do. And they’ll never lack for a job as long as the EU is around. Even the Times, always a cheerleader of diversity, acknowledges that all those languages are “a bit of a strain.”
The situation is only going to get worse. There’s a movement to recognize Luxembourgish, even though citizens of Luxembourg also speak German and French.
And now there’s a debate over whether to add Turkish, even if Turkey doesn’t become a member state. That’s because of Cyprus, the island that’s divided between a Turkish-speaking breakaway region and the Greek-speaking Republic of Cyprus. The Times says the two sides have been in talks to reunite the island and the republic, which is part of the EU, has requested official status for Turkish as a gesture of goodwill to the north.
In practice, English, German and French are spoken most often at the EU, because most everyone in Europe speaks one of those languages. English is spoken most often of all. But get this: After Britain’s vote to withdraw from the EU, France has been demanding that English be demoted as a language.
No wonder the EU can’t speak with one voice on issues such as immigration and trade. Everyone’s speaking his own language.
Daniel Allott is deputy commentary editor for the Washington Examiner
