Just the Facts | Irish and Multilingualism in the EU

“The language of Europe is translation” – Umberto Eco 

Multilingualism is a founding principle of the EU, reflecting its cultural and linguistic diversity. Under this policy, the EU aims to ensure that all citizens have access to EU information in their own languages, thus enabling engagement and promoting transparency and equality between Member States. Currently, the EU has 24 official languages, with Irish gaining full and working status in 2022 – yet some limitations remain. This Just the Facts examines how the EU’s policy of multilingualism works in practice and some of the challenges to this fundamental EU policy.  

The EU’s policy of multilingualism

The EU is shaped by its cultural and linguistic diversity, which is not only reflected in its motto “United in Diversity”, but also embedded in its founding treaties. Multilingualism – the ability of societies, institutions and individuals to use several languages, or the co-existence of different language communities within the same geographical area – is shaped by democratic, historical, legal and practical factors in the EU. Under its policy of multilingualism, the EU aims to communicate with EU citizens in their own languages and protect Europe’s rich linguistic diversity.

Multilingualism is anchored in the EU treaties: Article 3 of the Treaty on the European Union (TEU) requires respect for cultural and linguistic diversity, while Article 165(2) of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU) promotes the teaching and dissemination of EU languages. Respect for cultural, religious and linguistic diversity is also protected under Article 22 of the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights, which prohibits discrimination, particularly against people belonging to minority groups. Member States retain the exclusive competence to define and recognise national minorities within their borders, including the right to national and regional minority languages. The European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages, adopted by the Council of Europe, further protects and promotes these languages.

This diversity is reflected in language skills across Europe: 59% of Europeans can hold a conversation in a language other than their mother tongue, rising to 79% among 15- to 24-year-olds. 28% of Europeans and 39% of young people can converse in more than one foreign language. Ireland remains below the EU average here: 40% of Irish people can hold a conversation in one foreign language, while 18% have this ability in more than one foreign language, according to a 2023 Eurobarometer survey.

What are the official EU languages?

The first official languages of the European Economic Community (EEC) upon its founding in 1957 were Dutch, French, German and Italian, with EEC’s Regulation No. 1 determining the languages to be used by the Community. Danish and English were added in 1973 with the accession of Ireland, the UK and Denmark.

Today, the EU has 24 official languages, including English and Irish. The 24 languages represent 23 of the 27 EU Member States, with the remaining four countries (Austria, Belgium, Cyprus and Luxembourg) sharing national languages with neighbouring countries.

Ireland is one of six EU Member States to have two or more state languages, with both English and Irish being recognised. Cyprus, Malta and Finland also have two state languages each, while Belgium and Luxembourg each have three. Not all national languages have the status of official EU languages, however; examples include Luxembourgish, which has been an official language of Luxembourg since 1984, or Turkish, an official language of Cyprus.

All 24 official languages of the EU are accepted as working languages in the EU institutions, which have the right to determine their internal language use. In practice, however, only three languages – English, French, and German – are used widely, with English being the de facto lingua franca in most EU institutions, especially since the EU’s Eastern enlargement in 2004. An exception is the European Court of Justice, which works mainly in French. In 2020, 84% of EU documents were produced in English, followed at a distance by French at almost 3% and German at 2%, with “others” comprising 11%. This indicates an increasingly unilingual working reality in the EU institutions.

Following Brexit, the proportion of native English speakers in the EU dropped from 13% in 2012 to just 2% in 2023. Besides being an official state language in Ireland and Malta, English is the most widely spoken foreign language in the EU, with nearly half of Europeans having English skills. It remains the dominant working language of most EU institutions and is still stipulated as an official EU language according to Regulation No. 1 – any change to this would require the unanimity of all Member States.

Irish – an official working language of the EU

Irish became a Treaty language in 1973, meaning that only the EU treaties (and no other legal documents) were translated into Irish. On 1 January 2007, Irish became the EU’s 23rd official language, following a campaign by Irish language advocacy groups in the early 2000s, which prompted the Irish government to request official status in 2005. However, due to the lack of qualified translation staff, a derogation arrangement was in place from 2007 to 2022, meaning that the amount of material translated into Irish was restricted.

On 1 January 2022, the Irish language gained full status as an official and working EU language, putting it on an equal footing with the other 23 languages of the EU. As a result, the proportion of EU documents translated into Irish increased from just 1.1% in 2020 to all legislation and other communication materials from 2022 onwards. In 2021, the Commission noted that the end of the derogation would mean a “significant additional workload for the institutions”, requiring additional recruitment of Irish translators and interpreters. Accordingly, the number of Irish-language staff in EU institutions rose from 58 in 2015 to 138 in April 2021 and 200 in 2022.

While Irish-language interpreters are employed in both the Council and the Commission, a derogation is still in place on a full Irish interpretation service in the committees of the European Parliament. This is due to a vote by the European Parliament in 2024, which MEPs justified by referring to limited resources and a lack of qualified Irish translators. In practice, this means that Irish – along with Maltese – does not currently have an interpretation service on par with that of other EU languages in the European Parliament, despite the fact that MEPs have the right to use any official language when speaking in Parliament. This will continue until the end of the Parliament’s current mandate in 2029. Some Irish MEPs – notably Cynthia Ní Mhurchú and Seán Kelly – have been vocal in calling for an end to this derogation and for Ireland to use the opportunity of its Presidency of the Council of the EU in 2026 to promote equality for the Irish language in the European Parliament.

Treatment of regional and minority languages in the EU

In addition to the 24 official EU languages, there are about 60 regional and minority languages with varying degrees of official recognition by Member States. For example, Latvia, the Netherlands and Portugal each recognise one regional language, while Italy, Hungary, Poland and Romania each recognise more than 10 regional languages. Examples include Basque in Spain, Lower Sorbian in Germany, German in countries such as Denmark and Czechia, Irish in the UK, and Romani in a number of European countries.

In 2023, the Spanish government requested that Catalan, Basque and Galician – which have been co-official languages at the national level since 1978 – be added to the official languages of the EU. A corresponding proposal by Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez failed to receive support from national representatives in the EU’s General Affairs Council in March 2025, however, with a key concern being the financial implications of granting recognition. To estimate the cost of this, EU officials looked at the example of Irish: according to an internal assessment by the European Commission, the estimated cost of translation and interpretation services to provide Irish as a full working language was about €44 million a year.

Multilingualism in practice

All EU legislation needs to be translated into all 24 official languages. The EU deems this to be essential throughout the legislative process, enabling EU citizens to access information in their own language, understand their rights and obligations, and engage meaningfully in public debate. As a result, there is a significant requirement for professional translators and interpreters in the EU institutions. There are around 4,000 translators across the EU institutions (2,000 in the Directorate-General for Translation alone) and 1,000 interpreters. About 43% of the staff of the Court of Justice work in the translation and interpreting services, and 2.2 million pages are translated each year in the Commission. All translation and interpretation services across the EU institutions combined cost around €1.1 billion per year, accounting for less than 1% of the EU budget or about €2 per citizen per year.

The EU regards computer-assisted translation tools and machine translation as crucial to efficiency and has a range of its own artificial intelligence (AI) and translation tools, such as eTranslation. As part of this, an Irish machine translation engine based on neural technology was built in March 2018 and made available to the EU institutions, to the Irish authorities, and to SMEs. The rapid advancement of AI brings both the potential for further efficiency gains in long translation processes – but also poses ethical and security questions, with risks for jobs and digital sovereignty, as many AI tools are provided by a small number of US tech companies. EU institutions therefore face the challenge of balancing these risks and opportunities in a way that upholds core values and ensures human oversight.

Challenges relating to the EU’s multilingualism policy

Language equality has remained a fundamental EU principle even as the number of languages has grown with EU enlargement over the last decades. When countries join the EU, their national languages do not automatically become official EU languages; rather, the unanimous agreement of all Member States in the Council of the EU is required. In practice, most accession countries to date have had their main national language added; however, the example of Irish shows that this is not necessarily immediate or automatic. With nine countries currently having EU candidate status, further accessions to the bloc could see a significant expansion of the list of official EU languages in the coming years. In Iceland, there have been concerns about whether EU membership would weaken the Icelandic language, prompting Irish Minister of State for European Affairs Thomas Byrne to point out that the Irish language is a model for how indigenous languages can thrive under EU membership.

Another challenge of the EU’s multilingualism policy is that, while the cost of translating EU documents into 24 languages is relatively small within the overall EU budget, the process can take months. This became clear in March 2026, when the European Commission proposed to circulate only English versions of the EU-Mercosur trade deal for approval by EU governments and the European Parliament in order to speed up ratification, which was met with backlash from France and underlined the political sensitivity of language policy within the EU. The Commission’s proposal in the case of the EU-Mercosur deal also reveals the risk of tension between the EU’s simplification agenda on the one hand, which prioritises faster and leaner governance, and multilingualism on the other, which requires extensive translation, interpretation, and legal coordination. With growing calls for simplification, the EU’s multilingualism policy must continue to be upheld and linguistic diversity supported in practice, as a key tool for ensuring democratic participation, legal certainty, and equality among Member States.

With its Culture Compass for Europe (2025), the EU aims to preserve linguistic and cultural diversity. However, this also means safeguarding EU funding earmarked for language initiatives – for example in the areas of education, such as under the Erasmus+ programme, and culture, with the Creative Europe programme providing funding for literary translations and other language-related activities. The next Multiannual Financial Framework (MFF) – and particularly changes to the AgoraEU programme, which covers culture, media, civil society, and EU values – will broadly determine how the EU’s linguistic diversity is protected and promoted in the years to come.