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Panorama

Le Français, deuxième langue de l'Union européenne ?

French, Second Language in the European Union ?
Jan Fidrmuc, Victor Ginsburgh and Shlomo Weber

Abstracts

The European Union has recently expanded from 15 to 25 countries. In line with this enlargement, the list of official EU languages has grown from 11 to 20. Currently, the EU extends equal treatment to all member countries' official languages by providing translations for documents and interpreting services. This, however, is costly, especially when recognizing that many Europeans speak one of the procedural languages of the EU, English, French or German, either as their native language or as a foreign language. We compute disenfranchisement rates that would result from using only the three procedural languages for all EU business. These three languages could serve as pivotal languages to which and from which the 17 other languages could be translated. We argue that an efficient solution would be to decentralize the provision of translations, so that each country (language) could decide to use the transfer from the EU the way it wants, with translation into its own language as one among the possible uses.

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References

Electronic reference

Jan Fidrmuc, Victor Ginsburgh and Shlomo Weber, “Le Français, deuxième langue de l'Union européenne ?”Économie publique/Public economics [Online], 15 | 2004/2, Online since 12 January 2006, connection on 18 January 2026. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/economiepublique/125; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/economiepublique.125

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About the authors

Jan Fidrmuc

Brunel University, Grande-Bretagne et CEPR

Victor Ginsburgh

ECARES Université Libre de Bruxelles et Core, Université catholique de Louvain

Shlomo Weber

Core, Université catholique de Louvain, Southern Methodist, University Texas et CEPR

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Copyright

The text and other elements (illustrations, imported files) are “All rights reserved”, unless otherwise stated.

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