Law and Language in the European Union

The EEC (1957) consisted of six Member States with a combined total of four official languages. By 2004 this organization had evolved into a European Union of twenty-five Member States with more than twenty official languages among them. This increase has presented numerous challenges to the EU's internal linguistic regime. Some of these languages English in particular have been more equal than others, however, and languages such as Catalan and Welsh that lack nation-wide official status in any