Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2000-04-12-Speech-3-320"
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"en.20000412.12.3-320"2
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"Mr President, I should like to address my remarks on languages to my fellow Members, of course, but also to our interpreters, who enable this Parliament to function, to the rapporteur, of course, not for his work as rapporteur but because he is also a poet in this Parliament and, moreover, as I have discovered, one who speaks my mother tongue perfectly. What better rapporteur could there be?
When one is a new Member of the European Parliament, as I am, one finds oneself dealing with all sorts of things: chocolate, end-of-life vehicles, the qualified majority, dried beans, Spanish lentils, anything and everything. Then, suddenly, one finds that one is going to have to deal with something that gives Europe its historic and cultural depth, namely its languages. And when one looks back at the great periods in history, and I am thinking here of the Renaissance, that great age of trade and commerce, what remains of that era today are the cultural achievements, the artefacts of our heritage, and thus will it ever be.
In terms of languages, Europe has known times when a single language predominated: Latin, and also French. Now it tends to be English. So what are we to tell our fellow citizens for this year 2001. Let me just briefly mention a few points. Firstly, that European unity may not mean linguistic unity. Next, that every language is deserving of respect and deserves to be promoted and defended. This is applicable to any amount of things: monuments, objects, you name it. Why should it not be the case for mankind’s best and most lasting achievement, i.e. his method of communicating with his neighbour? And then, all languages are learnt within the family first of all. This is why we call them “mother tongues”, and no State, whatever it may be, may have the direct, indirect, explicit or implicit goal of destroying one of its mother tongues, or of allowing it to disappear.
Furthermore, finally, without linguistic diversity, there is no Europe, because this is also one of the few, and perhaps the only, parliament in the world which operates in eleven languages, to the extent that occasionally we speak in this House for the purpose of being interpreted and not to be heard in the original. It is up to us to construct this dialectic of European unity and its linguistic diversity."@en1
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