Languages of the European Union

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Languages of the European Union
Multilingual sign in the European Parliament
Official	Bulgarian Croatian Czech Danish Dutch English Estonian Finnish French German Greek Hungarian Irish Italian Latvian Lithuanian Maltese Polish Portuguese Romanian Slovak Slovene Spanish Swedish
Regional	Russian, Luxembourgish, Turkish, Sami languages, Basque, Catalan, Galician, Breton, Romani, Albanian, Serbian, Ukrainian, Occitan, Arpitan, Corsican, Sardinian
Immigrant	Arabic, Armenian, Chinese, Berber languages, Kurdish languages, Hebrew
Signed	Many sign languages, in the French Sign Language family, German Sign Language family and Swedish Sign Language family; also the Maltese Sign Language
Keyboard layout	QWERTY, QWERTZ, AZERTY, Bulgarian, Greek

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The European Union (EU) has 24 official languages, of which three – English, French and German – were considered "procedural" languages but this notion was abandoned^[1] by the European Commission (whereas the European Parliament accepts all official languages as working languages).^[2] In fact English and French are used in the day-to-day workings of the institutions of the EU. Institutions have the right to define the linguistic regime of their working ^[3] but the Commission and a number of other institutions did not do this as indicated by several Court judgments ^[4]

The EU asserts that it is in favour of linguistic diversity. This principle is enshrined in the EU Charter of fundamental rights (art. 22) and in the Treaty on European Union (art. 3(3) TEU). In the EU, language policy is the responsibility of member states, and the EU does not have a common language policy; EU institutions play a supporting role in this field, based on the principle of "subsidiarity"; they promote a European dimension in the member states' language policies. The EU encourages all its citizens to be multilingual; specifically, it encourages them to be able to speak two languages in addition to their native language.^[5] Though the EU has very limited influence in this area, as the content of educational systems is the responsibility of individual member states, a number of EU funding programmes actively promote language learning and linguistic diversity.^[6]

All 24 official languages of the EU are accepted as working languages, but in practice only three – English, French, and German – are in wide general use in its institutions, and of these, English^{[7][8][9][10]} is the most commonly used. The most widely understood language in the EU is English, which is understood by 44% of all adults, while German is the most widely used mother tongue, spoken by 18%. French is an official language in all three of the cities that are political centres of the Union: Brussels, Belgium; Strasbourg, France; and Luxembourg City, Luxembourg. Since the exit of the United Kingdom from the EU in 2020, the government of France has encouraged greater use of French as a working language.^[11]

Luxembourgish and Turkish, which have official status in Luxembourg and Cyprus, respectively, are the only two official languages of EU member states that are not official languages of the EU. In 2023, the Spanish government requested that its co-official languages Catalan, Basque, and Galician be added to the official languages of the EU.^[12]