Spain’s proposal to recognise Catalan, Basque and Galician as official EU languages was effectively turned down by member countries on Tuesday afternoon. The decision is a blow to Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez, who needs the support of Catalan separatists Junts to keep his minority government operational.
But the bid was surely perdido from the start: getting unanimous approval from EU countries is unimaginable. Well, almost. If you take Spain's initiative to its logical conclusion, you quickly see how tonto it was from the get-go.
For starters, there's the cost. Catering to Catalan, Basque, and Galician would demand a phalanx of additional translators, interpreters, and digital infrastructure. It already costs roughly €1 billion each year to run the institutions in the EU’s 24 official languages.
Add three more to the mix and that bill becomes unpalatably picante. Well aware of this, Sánchez had devised a way of absorbing the costs so that Spain would take the hit – estimated at €132 million per year. But who's to say that the next government would continue that commitment?
Then there are the numbers. If Catalan or Galician gain recognition, why not smaller regional languages, such as Breton (spoken by around 200,000 people in France) or Frisian (400,000 people in the Netherlands)?
Neapolitan and its estimated 5.5 million speakers in Italy are ten times more numerous than the 520,000 native Maltese speakers. And whilst there are 9 million Catalan speakers, Galician has only 2.4 million. Basque, fascinating language though it is, has just 750,000 – hardly worth a dedicated comms department (not least given virtually all speakers will understand Spanish).
And justifying official language status by the number of speakers poses other questions of principle. Why not in that case Ukrainian, spoken by an estimated 4 million people in the EU since the start of the war? Or Russian, with over 5 million speakers?
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