English could vanish as an official EU language if Brexit proceeds. EU Commission head Juncker has avoided using English, and a top EU parliamentary official has warned of language rules contained in EU treaties.

Danuta Hubner, a Polish politician and chair of the European Parliament’s English language affairs committee, has come out with a warning that a British exit from the European Union could also delete English from the EU’s list of 24 official languages. That possibility reverberated Tuesday far beyond the administrative levels of Article 50 – the provision allowing a member state to leave the bloc under EU treaty rules.

Addressing the European Parliament on Tuesday, European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker spoke only in French and German, clearly avoiding the use of English. During past crises, on the euro zone, for example, he had used English prominently as well.

“We have a regulation … where every EU country has the right to notify one official language,” Hübner had told a press conference late on Monday.

“If we don’t have the UK, we don’t have English (as an official language),” she warned, adding that keeping it would require assent by all remaining member states.

The chairman of the European Parliament’s Constitutional Affairs Committee (AFCO) was referring to the Treaty on European Union in its consolidated version published in early June that incorporates wordings of the Maastricht and Lisbon treaties of 1992 and 2007 respectively.

Her remarks prompted the Wall Street Journal to observe that the European Commission had begun using French and German more often in its external communications since Britain voted to leave the EU last Thursday.

Main working language

English is the main working language of EU institutions and officials in Brussels and Strasbourg, and – to avoid misunderstandings – at the European Central Bank. It’s also one of three languages used for EU patent applications.

English-speaking Malta on EU entry in 2004 picked Maltese. Ireland chose Irish Gaelic in 1973. French was the EU’s dominant official language until the arrival from the 1990s of Sweden, Finland and Austria, and then eastern European nations.

Article 50 of the consolidated Treaty on European Union allows “any member state” to withdraw from the bloc.

Translations required

Article 55 of the Treaty on European Union – dating back to Maastricht – stipulates that the treaty must be “equally authentic” in each of the EU’s 24 official languages, with English currently included.

That article also states that member states may determine that the treaty “also be translated into any other languages” – one of the many tasks for the European Commission with its permanent staff of 1,750 linguists and 600 assistants.

Article 20 under the headline “Non-Discrimination” says citizens of the Union have the right via the treaty to petition and address the European Parliament, EU institutions and the European Ombudsman “in any of the Treaty languages and to obtain a reply in the same language.”

An add-on treaty protocol states in its Article 4 that any draft legislation originating from a member state or EU council president must be translated into the other “official languages of the Union” within eight weeks.

Another treaty protocol (number 3) on the European Court of Justice states that its “language arrangements shall be laid down” by European Council “acting unanimously,” after consulting the European Parliament and Commission.

Post-Brexit: do-it-yourself translations?

Hübner on Monday said that if Britain quit the EU, Article 55 listing the EU’s treaty languages would have to be expanded unanimously by the remaining member states to retain English as one of the bloc’s official languages.

Otherwise, postulated the news agency Reuters, Britons – and by implication English-speakers outside the EU – “would have to do translations themselves.”

French and German officials have long lobbied for their mother tongues to be more widely used in Brussels. English has been hard to dislodge as Europe’s lingua franca.

ipj/kl (Reuters, AP)

9 April 2014, Wednesday /ANKARA, TODAY’S ZAMAN

Two British journalists who used to work as editors at the Anadolu Agency’s (AA) English news service have left their jobs, saying they do not want to work at Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s “propaganda mouthpiece.”

In the article “We Quit Working for Erdogan’s Propaganda Mouthpiece” published on the UK site of Vice international magazine on Tuesday, journalists Kate O’Sullivan and Laura Benitez said, “We joined the agency in January, supposedly to edit English-language news, but quickly found ourselves becoming English-language spin doctors.”

The two applied for the job at Anadolu after seeing an ad in the Guardian daily.

“The AA’s editorial line on domestic politics — and Syria — was so intently pro-government that we might as well have been writing press releases,” it was stated in the article.

O’Sullivan and Benitez also criticized Deputy Prime Minister Bülent Arınç for downplaying the number of imprisoned journalists in Turkey at an event at London’s Chatham House. The two journalists later had the opportunity to visit London on business and resigned as soon as they arrived in the UK.

The journalists said the Anadolu Agency was once a point of national pride, but today “it’s at the end of one of the many sets of strings in the ruling [Justice and Development Party] AK Party’s puppet parade.” They said most of Turkey’s TV stations are heavily influenced by the state and the “few opposition channels can expect to have their licenses revoked at any time or be banned from broadcasting key events, such as live election footage or anything that might detract from how fantastic the government are.”

“Much of Turkey’s English-language news came via Today’s Zaman, the largest English-language newspaper in Turkey,” the article said. “Written in good, accessible English, and featuring Western humour and Istanbul-minded opinions, Today’s Zaman provided international eyes with a window into Turkey’s domestic affairs,” it added.

Anadolu Agency Director General Kemal Öztürk, the former press adviser to Erdoğan, is described in the article as a “government cabinet wannabe.” With exclusive access to ministers, the agency could report about domestic affairs as soon as events in the ruling party unfolded, O’Sullivan and Benitez said, adding: “Sources, often the most difficult part of a reporter’s job, were also a breeze: ‘The Foreign Minister told me, so yes it’s true’ — no second source-checks needed. The domestic news editing policy was, essentially: don’t ask questions. Ever.”

According to article, the agency has a more relaxed approach on foreign affairs and correspondents were free to report on events from anywhere they wanted, with a few guidelines to consider.

“A good example of the domestic editorial policy in action came the morning after tapes were leaked in which you can allegedly hear Erdogan and his son discussing how to dispose of a ‘significant’ amount of money. Translators [in Anadolu] went into panic mode to get the real story out to the English-speaking world — that, of course, the tapes had been fabricated.

While the Zaman media group has been working to portray Erdoğan as a “corrupt dictator, hell bent on control and oppression,” the article said, the pro-government media is “just as tirelessly working to paint a picture of a shadowy ‘parallel state’ that is working beneath the surface to twist the minds and thoughts of the vulnerable Turkish public.”

The article quoted Erdoğan as saying “We will get in their cave to catch them,” in reference to the members of the parallel state.

“It is this polarisation of the press that leaves a tightly-squeezed no-man’s land of moderate news sources ripe for accusations of misconduct and terrorism. Patriotism is ingrained in Turkey’s cultural psychology; Turkey has, in many ways, defined itself by its ability to self-protect,” the article said, adding the threat of outside or “foreign” control has been a part of the country’s consciousness since the Republic of Turkey was founded in 1923.

A Brexit for English as EU language?

Turkey: Two British editors quit AA, calling it Erdoğan’s propaganda machine