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Comment by sys_64738 | Hacker News Reader

Only Ireland has English as their primary language of the EU so it makes sense.

English is the dominant language of Ireland, Malta (and Scotland and Wales) but as each has a "national" language and English had already been selected by the UK, Ireland nominated Irish and Malta Maltese as an official EU language.

So at the moment there is no country that has claimed English as its official language for EU purposes, thus it's legally OK to ignore anything official from or within the EU that is in English.

Malta has the population of Oakland, but most of the people there apparently speak Maltese. Ireland has about half the population of the Bay Area but only about 40% of them claim to have some facility in Irish. In both countries it appears English is universally understood and spoken. (all this info from Wikipedia FWIW).

I think it would be smart for the EU to nominate an English (of some sort) as the supranational language as it would elevate no member state over another. This same approach has worked pretty well for India, where the use of that language has a far more fraught history. But Malta or Ireland could simply take one for the team and switch their nominated language.

> But Malta or Ireland could simply take one for the team and switch their nominated language.

I'm pretty sure that you can have more than one nominated language, given that Belgium and Spain have a bunch of them.

Not really. Every EU Member State could only nominate one language. Some of them nominated an "alternative" one because their main one was already an official language (e.g. Irish).

This is the reason the only Spanish language which is an official EU language is Castillian. The other three (Galician, Catalan and Basque) are not EU official languages. Same happens to many other languages spoken in Europe.

Malta and Ireland benefit from having an official language. The EU employs Irish and Maltese translators in extremely well paid tax-free jobs.

Maybe Austria would do it? It's the only EU country I can think of that doesn't claim to have its own language. Edit: also Belgium and Luxembourg.

Luxembourg has its own language

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luxembourgish

Yes but it's not their "official" EU language. I don't know if they nominated German or simply didn't nominate one at all as German was already official.

Yet by far the biggest shared language in the EU is english, no contest.

It seems Ireland's official language of the EU is Irish:

https://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/E-8-2018-00402...

It makes no sense at all.

What if you want to make organisations who need English translations of EU documents foot the bill for translating into a non Official EU language?

That would be everyone.

What makes sense is for everyone to use the single language that people are able to effectively use to communicate across Europe, namely English.

Malta has English as an official language, too.

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