The EU and Minority Languages: Real or Perceived Failure?

Melissa Kronenthal

Over the last two decades increasing social and political integration in the European Union has gone hand-in-hand with increasing support for autochthonous minority-language communities. Since the early 1980s the EU has passed a number of resolutions and financed several initiatives designed to support minority languages. Nevertheless, in this paper I show that not only is the outlook for these languages still discouraging in Europe, but also that this plethora of support is not being readily perceived by the minority language communities themselves. The data for this paper come from the Galician community in Spain, and were obtained through an internet-based survey. The survey has attempted to measure perceptions of language vitality in three classic domains: demography, status, and institutional support (see Sachdev and Bourhis 2001) as well as gauge the impact of ongoing integration and the effectiveness of the EU's support measures on this vitality. To date more than 1000 surveys have been returned. In general Galician's subjective vitality indicators are not good, showing that the prestige of the language suffers in comparison to both Spanish and English and that there is an overwhelming perception of language decline among speakers. More surprising, however, is the pervasive belief that the EU is failing in its support and is fundamentally negative towards minority languages. If the EU is truly committed to safeguarding linguistic diversity, I argue that a fundamental shift in policy is required at the European level, and I conclude by suggesting some ways in which this might be done.