EUobserver.com -- the German government is stepping up its efforts to make German more prominent in the EU, demanding that EU documentation be translated into German or else it will not attend meetings. This follows a similar protest voiced by French President Chirac in March, 06, who claimed that domination of the English language in the EU was against French national interests.
"Germany has a right to have these documents in German," the deputy foreign minister, Gunter Gloser, told German news agency DPA on Thursday (20 april).
In a joint statement earlier this month, the German parliament and the French national assembly denounced the "unacceptable drift toward a monolingual system" dominated by English.
Bundestag president Norbert Lammert wrote in a letter to European Commission president Jose Manuel Barroso that the German parliament would refuse to debate EU documents that were not printed in German.
Berlin on Thursday said it wanted a reply from Brussels on the matter before the next EU summit in June.
The Berlin move is the second promotion for German in recent weeks, as the EU Ombudsman in late March asked that German be considered for a language choice on EU presidency websites.
Ombudsman Nikiforos Diamandouros made the request to the council - representing member states - after a German language association complained that presidency websites was only available in English and French.
With the union's enlargement towards the east in 2004, the second EU language is German, spoken by 12 percent of citizens.
French is spoken by close to 11 percent, while Russian shares the fourth slot with Spanish.
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