Voting on the Choice of Core Languages in the European UnionÂ

Jan Fidrmuc, Victor Ginsburgh and Shlomo Weber ()

No 005-08, Working Papers from International School of Economics at TSU, Tbilisi, Republic of Georgia

Abstract: Extensive multilingualism is one of the most important and fundamental principles of the European Union (EU). However, a large number of languages (currently 23) hinders communication and imposes substantial financial and legal costs. On the other hand, the reduction of the number of languages would disenfranchise some or many EU citizens. We use the results of a survey on languages and argue that even though a linguistic reform reducing the number of languages is unlikely to gain sufficient political support today, this may change in the future since young people are more proficient at speaking foreign languages.

Keywords: Languages; Disenfranchisement; European Union; Linguistic standardization (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D70 O52 Z13 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 15 pages
Date: 2008-08
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Published

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.iset.ge/files/005-08.pdf First version, 2008 (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Voting on the choice of core languages in the European Union (2009)
Working Paper: Voting on the choice of core languages in the European Union (2009)
Working Paper: Voting on the choice of core languages in the European Union (2009)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:tbs:wpaper:08-005

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from International School of Economics at TSU, Tbilisi, Republic of Georgia Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).