EU pulls brakes on adding Catalan, Basque and Galician as official languages

European Union countries have expressed reservations about adding Catalan, Galician and Basque as official languages after the Spanish government pushed for the move.

The request from Madrid came as Spain’s acting prime minister Pedro Sánchez courts the support of Catalan separatist parties in the hopes of building a sufficient majority to form a government, two months since an inconclusive election.

Spain set out its case for adding the three languages at a meeting of EU ministers in Brussels, where acting foreign minister José Manuel Albares Bueno pointed out that with as many as 10 million speakers, Catalan is among the 15 most-spoken languages in the EU.

“These are not minority languages. The number of Catalan speakers is more than several languages that are already official languages of the EU,” he told reporters.

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Basque, which is estimated to have 750,000 speakers in Spain, and Galician, which has about two million, made their debuts in Spain’s national parliament on Tuesday as simultaneous interpreters were brought in and headphones installed to allow for multilingual debate.

The reform to allow the use of the languages had been demanded by Catalan separatist parties as a condition for supporting a member of the Spanish Socialist Party, which is headed by Mr Sánchez, to become the speaker of parliament.

To become official EU languages they require the unanimous support of all 27 member states. When the matter was discussed on Tuesday, several had reservations.

Minister of State for European Affairs and Defence of Ireland Peter Burke said questions had been raised about “what it means, what precedent it sets and also in terms of any unintended consequences”.

The costs incurred in translation for the three languages “would be a substantial bill”, he added, though Spain had offered to pay.

[ Irish translation of European parliament documents costing €43 per page (2017) ]

“Ireland’s position is very clear that we very much are in favour of linguistic pluralism,” Mr Burke said. “However, in this case, many of the colleagues around the table were of the view that they need an impact assessment and more time is needed to evaluate.”

Sweden’s Europe minister Jessika Roswall said it was “too early” to decide on the proposal before the legal and financial implications had been studied.

There was a need to examine “what consequences will this have, if there are several minority languages within the European Union that are not official languages,” she continued.

There are several languages that are widely-spoken within the EU but that do not have official status, including Russian and Arabic. Though Luxembourgish and Turkish are national languages in Luxembourg and Cyprus respectively, neither is an official EU language.

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The EU institutions collectively spend about €1 billion a year on translation and interpreting services for the 24 official languages, according to European Parliament figures.

Irish gained status as a full official EU language in 2022, meaning all documents are translated into Irish and ministers and members of the European Parliament can make contributions in Irish, following a delay in implementation since 2007 due to a shortage of translators.

In advance of the Brussels meeting, Sinn Féin criticised Tánaiste Micheál Martin for saying it was too early for Ireland to take a position on the official status of Catalan, Basque and Galician.

It was vital for the Government to “send a strong message of solidarity on behalf of Ireland abroad”, said the party’s spokesman on Gaeilge, Gaeltacht, Arts and Culture, Aengus Ó Snodaigh.

“It is never ‘too early’ to express support for others being granted the same rights we fought hard to obtain.”