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10 million voices: make Catalan an official EU language
18/02/2022 19:12
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European citizens should be able to fully engage with the administration in their native languages. Requiring native speakers of one European language to switch to a different one to be allowed to speak in the European Parliament or other European institutions is at odds with the European Parliament's resolution that linguistic rights must be respected "without limiting the rights of one [language] compared with another" (European Parliament resolution of 7 February 2018 on protection and non-discrimination with regard to minorities in the EU Member States (2017/2937(RSP)). Today, the Catalan language it is even excluded from EU legislation.
This is particularly striking in the case of non-official EU languages that have an order of magnitude more native speakers than some official EU languages. While it may not be practically possible to make every single European language official, those spoken by millions of Europeans can and should receive this status.
We therefore call for the relevant regulation to be amended in order to add Catalan, a language spoken by over 10 million Europeans and understood by 12 million across three EU Member States (Spain, France and Italy), which is the official language of a sovereign state (Andorra) and taught at over 150 universities around the globe, to the current list of official languages of the EU.
Catalan-speaking citizens of the European Union have a right not to be treated as second-class citizens because of their language.
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