Le Français, deuxième langue de l'Union européenne ?
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.
Index terms
Keywords :
langues, union européenne, construction européenne, solidarité, capital humain, démocratie, justice socialeKeywords:
lingua franca, languages, european Union, european unification, solidarity, human capital, migration, social justiceJEL Codes:
D63 - Equity, Justice, Inequality, and Other Normative Criteria and Measurement, Z10 - GeneralReferences
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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