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Language Rights as a General Principle of Community Law

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 March 2019

Iñigo Urrutia  and
Iñaki Lasagabaster

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The territory of the European Union is made up of a rich and wide-ranging universe of languages. The European Union contains a wealth of languages. In its current form there are more than 60 autochthonous languages in the 27 Member States, with widely differing situations and legal statuses. The principal characteristic of the European linguistic diversity is the great heterogeneity of situations and internal legal statuses that the european languages display. Most of the languages of EU are spoken by very few people and few languages are enormously widespread. There are many languages in the EU, which, in spite of having an appreciable number of speakers, do not have official recognition. And there are languages that are co-official or have some sort of official recognition in some areas, but struggle to survive. Multilingualism is one of the defining characteristics of the EU, and it is worth examining how EU law deals with it.

Type
Articles
Information
German Law Journal , Volume 8 , Issue 5 , 01 May 2007 , pp. 479 - 500
Copyright
Copyright © 2007 by German Law Journal GbR 

References

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