Orban calls on France to promote multilingual EU

As reported by euractiv.fr, Commissioner Leonard Orban visited France recently to lay the groundwork for establishing co-operation on multilingualism ahead of the country’s stint at the EU’s helm in 2008. 

In a recent visit to France, Multilingualism Commissioner Leonard Orban took the opportunity to present his political diary for the year to come and declare his intention to strengthen the co-operation with the country, ahead of the French EU Presidency, which begins in June 2008.

Promoting the European Commission’s mandate on multilingualism, launched in 2007, Orban visited Paris on 19-20 July. 

“It is necessary to establish multilingual co-operation with France,” he declared to an audience of key political leaders, including French Higher Education and Research Minister Valerie Pecresse and Mouvement des Enterprises de France (MEDEF) President Laurence Parisot. 

Commissioner Orban pointed highlighted three key policy areas for 2007-2008, namely to support competitiveness, growth and employment with multilingualism. According to a recent study by the UK’s National Centre for Languages, 11% of European exporting SMEs lose markets because of a linguistic abilities deficit. 

To find solutions to this problem, the Commission, in co-operation with employers’ organisations from across Europe, will organise a conference on the topic ‘Languages make our deals’ on 21 September 2007 in Brussels, to promote foreign-language education in the EU so that each European citizen speaks at least two languages apart from his or her mother tongue – at present, some 56% of Europeans speak only one language. 

“It should be noted that the multilingualism objective is horizontal in nature,” Orban told a press conference. 

“It interacts with other European Union policies, such as culture, education, communication, social policy, employment, justice, freedom and security.” 

With 2008 already designated as Europan Year Intercultural Dialogue, Orban also said that he was aware of France’s dissatisfaction with the “growing prevalence of English as an official working language, to the detriment of French”, and added that “before the 2004 EU enlargement, there were only 11 official languages. Today, the EU has 23, but the budget was increased only by 20%”.

Multilingualism accounts for 1% of the EU’s budget, around €1.1 billion per annum. 

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