ANALYSING THE EU AGREEMENTS WITH SPAIN AND THE UK ON THE USE OF REGIONAL OR MINORITY LANGUAGES. A PRACTICAL ASSESSMENT

Authorship: Eva Pons Parera and Katharina Jiménez Weese, Universitat de Barcelona. Editor/coordinator: Vicent Climent-Ferrando, Government of Catalonia

The European Union (EU)’s language policy does not include Regional and Minority Languages (RMLs) as official EU languages. Some EU institutions, however, have reached an administrative agreement with the UK and the Spanish Governments on the use of certain RMLs (Basque, Catalan, Galician, Welsh and Scots Gaelic), respectively. In both cases, translations are provided by the government of the Member State concerned, only when requested and at its own expense. These language communities are often not aware of the use of these agreements.

The aim of this report is to evaluate these agreements to see how (in)effective these have been. The report also explores the possibilities of expanding these agreements to other RMLs in other Member States.

The present report has been developed by researchers from the University of Barcelona and coordinated by the Directorate-General for Language Policy of the Government of Catalonia, with the financial support of the European Network to Promote Linguistic Diversity.