Towards a multilingual modus operandi in the European Union

Abstract

Multilingualism is one of the pillars of the European Union (EU), enshrined in its treaties and celebrated in its motto, “united in diversity.” Yet multilingualism no longer has its own portfolio in the Commission, having been systematically downgraded and now being under the auspices of the Directorate-General for Translation, a directorate which nevertheless does not have a unit dedicated to multilingualism. Moreover, with the rise of English as the EU’s unofficial lingua franca, increasingly more material is produced in English and not translated at all. Therefore, we should ask ourselves whether the EU’s de facto linguistic and translation regimes are not at odds with the treaties. Drawing together transdisciplinary threads chiefly from linguistics, political science and political philosophy, this paper assesses the EU’s current linguistic regime, while looking at different models of linguistic justice, language rights, and the value of language to propose a new linguisticmodus operandi for the EU, grounded in (1) a language, (2) a translation, and (3) a cultural turn.