Rules governing the languages used by the European Union's
institutions Linguistic diversity is one of the basic
characteristics of the European Union and is a major cultural
asset. The accession of ten new Member States in May 2004 and
then two more in January 2007 has meant a doubling of the number
of official languages. No other organisation or institution in
the world operates in so many languages. The European Union's
institutions have common rules for languages, laid down by the
Council in 1958. Those rules have been amended a number of times
with successive enlargements and now cover twenty-three official
and working languages, namely: Bulgarian, Czech, Danish, Dutch,
English, Estonian, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hungarian,
Irish, Italian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Maltese, Polish,
Portuguese, Romanian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish and Swedish.To
ensure that the European Council and the Council function as
multilingual institutions, the General Secretariat of the
Council has a Language Service which, for