January 10, 2004: Pressure is growing to make the German language the EU's third official working language. At the end of October 2003 all parties represented in Germany's federal parliament, the Bundestag, supported a resolution calling on the German government "to pursue emphatically the adoption of German as a working language and the use of German in all EU publications, databases, standards, conferences and competitive bids on an equal footing with the other languages in use."

Currently it is estimated that only about 1% of all official EU documents and publications are available in German. This situation is especially odd since German is the language most widely spoken as a first language within the European Union. Including those Europeans who speak a second language, German with 145 million speakers ranks well ahead of French (105 million speakers), trailing only English with an estimated 176 million speakers. German is also widely spoken in Eastern Europe, home to the ten new member states joining the EU in May 2004.

According to Martin Schulz, vice-chairman of the SPD party in the European parliament, "German is an important and often used foreign language among the people of eastern Europe. Germany is by far the most important partner for international trade in this region and the importance of German in an expanded European Union will only increase. I notice that directly with my colleagues from eastern Europe who aleady have observer status at the European parliament. With most of them it is only normal to converse in German."

Business consultants, politicians and others are urging the German government to stop the "quiet tactic", largely a result of Germany's defeat in World War II, and start getting more persistent in its demands to have German added as an official EU working language. Peter Gauweiler, a CSU member of the German Bundestag, wants the German government to work toward having German placed on an equal footing with English and French within the EU. His Bundestag colleague Antje Blumenthal (CDU), who represents a district in the city of Hamburg, also supports the initiative: "All of the new EU members [in Eastern Europe] view Germany as their most important trade partner. Germany is in danger of losing this status because of an increasing language barrier among the younger segments of the population in eastern European countries."

According to Roland Kaehlbrandt, a lecturer on Romance languages from the Hertie Foundation, the "Germans have a disturbed relationship with their language." According to Kaehlbrandt, no other language has had so many words replaced by English vocabulary and collected as much "linguistic garbage" as the German language.

Where is the German language spoken in today's Europe? You might be surprised! Read more »