Dutch, English, French, German, Greek, and Swedish are all official languages at the national level in multiple countries (see table above).

In addition, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Hungarian, Italian, Slovak, and Slovene are official languages in multiple EU countries at the regional level.

[citation needed] Documents of major public importance or interest are produced in all official languages, but that accounts for a minority of the institutions′ work.

The EU Parliament has made clear that its member states have autonomy for language education, which by treaty the Union must respect.

[22] The vast majority of the 24 official EU languages belong to the Indo-European family: the three dominant subfamilies are the Germanic, Romance, and Slavic.

Romance languages are mostly spoken in western and southern European regions; they include French, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian, and Spanish.

[citation needed] When Ireland joined the EEC (now the EU) in 1973, Irish was accorded "Treaty Language" status.

The cost of translation, interpretation, publication, and legal services involved in making Irish an official EU language was estimated at just under €3.5 million a year.

[34] On 3 December 2015, a new regulation passed by the council had set a definitive schedule on the gradual reduction of the derogation of the Irish language.

The derogation was ultimately revoked on 1 January 2022, making Irish a fully recognised EU language for the first time in the state's history.

In addition to Croatian, this would include the Serbian, Bosnian, and Montenegrin written standards, all of them based in the same spoken dialect of Eastern Herzegovina, with the goal of reducing potential translation and interpretation costs if the other Western Balkan states eventually joined the EU as well.

[42] However, many languages other than Italian and the above-mentioned twelve are spoken across the country,[43] most of them being either Gallo-Italic or Italo-Dalmatian, which lack any sort of official recognition and protection.

The Spanish governments have sought to give some official status in the EU for the languages of the autonomous communities of Spain, Catalan/Valencian, Galician and Basque.

The official use of such languages will be authorised on the basis of an administrative arrangement concluded between the council and the requesting member state.

[44] On 16 November 2005, the President Peter Straub of the Committee of the Regions signed an agreement with the Spanish Ambassador to the EU, Carlos Bastarreche [es], approving the use of Spanish regional languages in an EU institution for the first time in a meeting on that day, with interpretation provided by European Commission interpreters.

This was done in exchange for the support of the Catalan separatist party Junts for Francina Armengol's candidacy for President of the Congress of Deputies.

On 26 February 2016 it was made public that Cyprus has asked to make Turkish an official EU language, in a “gesture” that could help reunification and improve EU–Turkey relations.

[citation needed] In September 2010, Luxembourg's foreign minister Jean Asselborn declined a request of the Alternative Democratic Reform Party (ADR) to make Luxembourgish an official language of the European Union citing financial reasons and also that German and French being already official languages would be sufficient for the needs of Luxembourg.

[citation needed] For millennia, Latin served as a lingua franca for administrative, scholarly, religious, political, and other purposes in parts of the present-day European Union.

Latin, along with Greek, was at the core of education in Europe from the schools of rhetoric of the Roman Republic in all of its provinces and territories, through the medieval trivium and quadrivium, through the humanists and the Renaissance, all the way to Newton's Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica (just to name one example of thousands of scientific works written in this language), to the public schools of all European countries, where Latin (along with Greek) was at the core of their curricula.

[citation needed] A wide variety of languages from other parts of the world are spoken by immigrant communities in EU countries.

They are based on the conclusions of the Grin Report,[72] which concluded that it would hypothetically allow savings to the EU of €25 billion a year (€54 for every citizen) and have other benefits.

At 19% of the total number of speakers, German was the most widely spoken native language, followed by French (15%), Italian (13%) Polish (9%) and Spanish (9%).

[80] The language situation has also disappointed many in France,[81] and Kristalina Georgieva, who is from Bulgaria, gained a round of applause when she told the European Parliament she would learn French while in the Commission.

[87][88] The rules governing the languages of the institutions of the Community shall, without prejudice to the provisions contained in the Statute of the Court of Justice, be determined by the council, acting unanimously (Article 290).

In addition, the mainstream actions of Community programmes which encourage mobility and transnational partnerships motivate participants to learn languages.

[citation needed] Youth exchanges, town twinning projects, and the European Voluntary Service also promote multilingualism.

The new programmes proposed for implementation for the financial perspective 2007–2013 (Culture 2007, Youth in Action, and Lifelong Learning) will continue and develop this kind of support.

The study concludes that there are unmet needs in this field, and proposes two options: creating an agency or setting up a European network of "Language Diversity Centres."

Another interesting step would be to translate important public websites, such as the one of the European Central Bank, or Frontex web site also, in at least one other language than English or French.