Multilingualism should reign in the EU

 

By Maeva Cifuentes

                In May’s issue of Le Monde Diplomatique, Dominique Hoppe, president of the AFFOI (Assembly of international francophone civil servants working for diversity), argues against the concept of a monolingual language regime in international organizations – precisely, against the use of English as a Lingua Franca (ELF)¹. According to him, the reasons given for shifting to a monolingual regime, namely budgetary restrictions, are unjustified, and on the contrary, a monolingual regime would ultimately cost more when taking into account secondary and implicit costs. Though the European Union spends about 1.1 trillion euros a year on linguistic services, Hoppe notes that this corresponds to less than 0.01% of the Union’s GDP (2.70 euros per citizen), while a monolingual regime would ultimately cost citizens who are not English native speakers about 48 euros per year.

The fact is that with the current information boom, linguistic costs have exploded over the last 20 years. The Union’s attempt to deal with these costs is their main argument in support of a monolingual regime or one reducing the number of languages used. Solutions vary from cutting down to three languages (English, French and German) and six languages (English, French, German, Italian, Polish and Spanish). However, this raises the question on which languages should be chosen. For instance, patents under the European Commission are now drafted in accordance with the above mentioned trilingual regime. Should further translation be required, only “high-quality” machine translation is offered to the user, unless there is a legal dispute on the patent. Reasonably, Italy fought the exclusion of Italian in this regime, Minister of EU Affairs Andrea Ronchi arguing that such a regime contradicts the principle of equal dignity of languages and creates a class system of languages. What criteria should be met for one language to be chosen over another in a plurilingual union? Evidently the number of speakers of the language is taken into account, but this is without regard to the millions of other language speakers who will consequently lose access to such information.

As Hoppe contends, a native speaker of the language has a privileged position in a monolingual regime. If the EU was to convert to such a regime, there would still be the need for translation, and would thus not reduce the cost, but increase the time and effort on the part of non-native English speakers. Other than a perceived cost benefit, the cons outweigh the pros of using ELF as the official language of the EU. Though a useful means of communication in a group of non-natives, it implicitly removes the fairness and equality that should be standard in the Union. Reverting to a monolingual regime would not only ultimately cost more money (perhaps not to the government, but to the people), but would also cost us in diversity, fairness, and the conservation of cultures.

 

1) English as Lingua Franca: defined in the Vienna Oxford International Corpus of English as the use of the English language as a common means of communication for speakers of different first languages