Voting on the choice of core languages in the European Union

Jan Fidrmuc, Victor Ginsburgh and Shlomo Weber ()

ULB Institutional Repository from ULB -- Universite Libre de Bruxelles

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. © 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Keywords: Disenfranchisement; European Union; Languages; Linguistic standardization (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2009-03
Note: SCOPUS: ar.j
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (21)

Published in: European journal of political economy (2009) v.25 n° 1,p.56-62

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

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 (2008)
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:ulb:ulbeco:2013/99264

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://hdl.handle.ne ... ulb.ac.be:2013/99264

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in ULB Institutional Repository from ULB -- Universite Libre de Bruxelles Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Benoit Pauwels ().