13 June 2004

Official multilingualism

As anyone visiting this country will quickly ascertain, Canada is a bilingual country, with English and French enjoying official status in all federal institutions. Lest we think having to know two languages is too great an inconvenience, the European Union now has 20 official languages: Czech, Danish, German, Estonian, Greek, English, Spanish, French, Italian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Hungarian, Maltese (yes, Maltese!), Dutch, Polish, Portuguese, Slovak, Slovenian, Finnish and Swedish. If the Annan Plan had been accepted and Cyprus had entered the EU as a united country, Turkish would have become an official language as well, making for a grand total of 21. Not surprisingly, a huge portion of the EU's budget goes into translation. Have they ever considered scrapping all these languages and giving Esperanto sole official status?

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