Catalan President Salvador Illa is fighting to have Spain’s regional languages – Catalan, Basque and Galician – recognised as official EU languages, Euronews reports.
Getting Catalan to become an official language of the EU was one of Catalan President Salvador Illa’s main goals during his latest visit to Brussels.
The language, spoken by some 10 million people in the Spanish regions of Catalonia, the Valencian Community and the Balearic Islands, Andorra and parts of France and Italy, is bidding to become an EU language, along with Basque and Galician. He believes this is a key requirement for the country’s citizens.
Illa said: “Giving the official status to these languages you are saying to the citizens of Catalonia, of Galicia, of the Basque country “you are part of Europe.”
The EU currently has 24 official languages. All its legal acts and treaties are translated into all of them, and plenary sessions of the European Parliament and meetings of the European Council and Council of the European Union are translated into each of the languages.
For Illa, “it is not about translating more or fewer documents, but about respecting the identity of European citizens.”
The decision must be unanimously approved by all 27 EU countries and is now being discussed by European affairs ministers. But since Spain presented the proposal during its rotating presidency in the summer of 2023, it has made little progress.
The inclusion of three new official languages could cost around 132 million euros a year, according to a preliminary report by the European Commission.
New languages for EP plenary sessions
Brussels estimates that each language would cost about 44 million euros a year, including adapting documents and hiring interpreters and translators. If the proposal is approved, Spain has offered to pay for it.
Catalan can now be spoken in the Council of the European Union if ministers request it weeks before the meeting. This was the case in September 2024, when Spanish Industry Minister Jordi Hereu spoke Catalan at a meeting for the first time in 20 years.
At the same time, the European Parliament is exploring the possibility of MEPs using all three languages during plenary sessions. Getting the 27 member states to back Spain’s demands to make the three languages official in the EU may not be easy.
The proposal was put forward by Pedro Sanchez’s government as a deal to win the support of pro-independence parties, especially former Catalan president Carles Puigdemont’s Junts per Catalunya party. But it is causing consternation in a number of EU countries who see it as a political manoeuvre by Sanchez.
“This was a demand of this political party, but is a shared demand of lots of people not only from Catalonia…, in the Basque country, in Galicia…,” Illa said. “This is not, let’s say, a political issue, or a political demand. I would put it from another angle. This is a fair measure from a linguistic point of view. There are 20 million citizens that have these official languages.”
