Is That a Fish in Your Ear?

The written history of the two main languages of the original EU also began with a bilingual edict. The Oath of Strasbourg was sworn in 842 C.E. by two grandsons of Charlemagne who ganged up on a cousin they suspected of trying to elbow them out of their inheritance. Charles and Louis spoke different languages—the one having an early dialect of German, the other an early dialect of what would become French. Each swore allegiance to the other in the language of his ally. This was not just feudal politeness. The oath was written down so it could be copied and taken around and read out to the armies of Charles and Louis. Louis did not need it to tell his own people not to fight Charles, nor did Charles need it to tell his own people not to fight Louis’s men. Each needed to give assurance to the other side that he was no longer an enemy but an ally in the common fight against the cousin, Lothaire. That is why they produced a bilingual screed, with the texts in the two languages in parallel columns, each intended not to say exactly the same thing, but to have exactly the same force when read aloud to bands of illiterate soldiers. The Strasbourg Oath, the founding document of two languages and also the key to the geographical shape that European nations have taken since then, is also the founding document of the EU’s language norm.

But there is a catch. It’s unlikely that the signatories of the oath actually spoke to each other in either of the languages written down. They probably used Latin for face-to-face negotiation of the terms of the treaty and then left their scribes to find a way of writing down the agreement in the (previously unrecorded) languages of their troops. So although there is no explicit original of the Oath of Strasbourg, it is very likely there was an implicit master text that would have been the out-turn of a bargaining session in learned Latin that was probably translated by scribes or educated slaves into Old High German and Old French, respectively.

It’s an open secret that the EU also possesses an interlanguage for most practical uses in the corridors of the Berlaymont building, in the canteens and private meeting rooms—and it’s English. However, it is definitely not the case that EU texts are first written in English and then translated. Things work in an altogether more interesting way. A panel or subcommittee meets to draft a regulation. It uses one of the four official working languages of the EU—German, French, English, Italian—but there are always other language drafters present. The first draft is argued over not only for content but also for how it is going to be expressed in the other working languages. The draft is then translated and the committee reconvenes with the drafters to smooth out difficulties and inconsistencies in the different versions. The drafters are indistinguishably language professionals and civil servants participating in the development of the substantive text of EU regulations. The back-and-forth movement of the draft between the committee and the drafting departments produces, in the end, a text all consider equal in all its versions, and in that sense the “language fiction” of the EU’s rule of parity is not fictional at all.

The European Court of Justice in Luxembourg (ECJ), which resolves questions of law that cannot be answered by any of the national appeals courts of the states that make up the EU, is run in a slightly different way. It has a single working language, which is French. All documents used at every level by the court are either written in French or translated into French by members of the army of language professionals who work there.