The European Union stands out among international organisations for the unprecedented scale of its multilingual functioning. With twenty-four official languages, multilingualism extends far beyond the question of linguistic rights and shapes European Union law across a wide range of fields.
Moving beyond narratives that oppose utopian aspirations to pragmatic constraints, this book offers a systemic reading of multilingualism in the European Union. How does the Union reconcile the free movement of goods with the need to provide consumers with intelligible information? How does EU law enable workers to cross borders despite linguistic barriers? What role does multilingualism play in the exercise of political rights and in the Union’s democratic ambitions? By exploring these tensions between unity and diversity, the book proposes a renewed reading of the European project. It presents a form of integration that does not seek uniformity but is articulated around respect for differences, including those of language. Through a transversal approach drawing on the case law of the Court of Justice of the European Union, primary and secondary legislation, institutional practices, as well as the economic and political rationales underpinning language regulation, the study sheds light on the paradoxes, transformations and underlying coherence of a legal order shaped by and within a plurality of languages.
The structure of the book makes this systematic analysis accessible to readers from different backgrounds, including legal scholars, linguists, researchers and practitioners of European Union law.
