In addition to the emergence and further development of Community law from a wide range of legal cultures, the status of official multilingualism of the European Union is an essential prerequisite for the success of integration. As early as the preparations for the Treaties of Rome of 25 March 1957, it was decided in a protocol on language regulation at the Foreign Ministers Conference from 23 to 25 July 1952 that the four languages of the six founding States (German, French, Italian, Dutch) should be on an equal footing. This language regime was subsequently incorporated into the EEC Treaty and the consolidated versions of the Accession Treaties were extended to include the relevant national languages of the candidate countries. Under Article 55(1) TEU, in its current version (Lisbon Treaty), the 24 languages of the 27 member states are equally authentic Treaty languages. Their function as official and working languages has already been laid down in Regulation No 1 EEC of 1958 and incorporated into subsequent consolidated versions. However, restrictions on the rules of procedure of the EU institutions and bodies have led to a dominance of English and French in internal practice.
The challenge
The large number of the currently 24 languages and their equally legally binding versions in EU law are particular features of Community/Union law. Under Article 24(3) and (4) TFEU, any citizen of the Union may write to the institutions and bodies referred to in Article 13 TEU and to the Ombudsman in one of the languages referred to in Article 55(1) TEU and receive an answer in the same language. All legal texts must be drafted in these languages, a fact that is relevant not only to text production but also to legal interpretation. The risks that official linguistic diversity poses both to the institutions of the Union and to the citizens of the Union have often been discussed and often been associated with the high level of translation required by the Union. On the other hand, the opportunities offered by linguistic, legal and political pluralism are of great importance. Linguistic diversity is a constituent feature of European identity, which is reflected in the texts of Community/Union law.
One right in 24 equally authentic versions
The central issue is that one right is created in twenty-four language versions in the EU. The premise of the authenticity of multilingual legal acts of the Union includes the possibility of different interpretations of texts. This is not only based on the language requirement, but may also be due to a variety of factors in the textual work in Union law. In a number of decisions, the European Court of Justice has dealt with the resolution of linguistic differences, highlighting both the binding nature of the different language versions and the specific nature of the legal terms used in Community law in relation to those used in the respective national legal systems.
By institutionalising the 24 official EU languages, new language-relevant legal concepts are emerging. Such reorientation requires innovative, transdisciplinary qualifications that the academic training must meet.
Implementation into teaching and research at the University of Cologne
The first interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary courses dealing with legal linguistics in some areas of European law have been held at the University of Cologne since 1997. In particular, as part of preparations for the Kölner Gemeinschaftskommentar on the European Charter of Fundamental Rights (edited by Peter J. Tettinger and Klaus Stern, Munich, 2006), a series of seminars, symposia and meetings of lawyers and Romanists at the University of Cologne had been held since 2000 in cooperation with practitioners of the EU institutions to discuss and further establish transdisciplinary links between legal linguistics in the European Union.
The study courses in European legal linguistics (BA/MA)
The resulting desiderate was taken into account with the establishment of two study courses, which have been set up as a BA course in 2007 and as a MA course in 2008 at the Faculty of Arts and Humanities at the University of Cologne. As joint courses of study which – for the first time in Germany – combine the legal, linguistic and political plurality of EU legal languages in a programme for teaching and research, they are conceived and supported jointly by the Faculties of Arts and Humanities and of law of the University of Cologne. They aim at providing legal and linguistic skills on a sound linguistic basis and thus form the basis for multilingual drafting activities in Union law. An important aspect is that the very different methods of legal and linguistic disciplines are not studied consecutively but simultaneously and are thus trained to address the issues of both disciplines from the outset.
Transdisciplinarity from the outset
In addition to the more applied Bachelor’s degree course with practical relevance, the Master’s course in European legal linguistics (ERL) opens up new perspectives in research and teaching. The cross-disciplinary dialogue, which is often difficult to develop in current working contexts and which is now often regarded as a missing key qualification, is discussed and further developed at research level in this course. One of the specificities of this approach is to open up a separate space for communication between the work of linguistics and law.
New supranational legal concepts and their linguistic design
Various concepts of linguistic and legal comparison are already being worked on in international law. Relevance to European law lies in the particular dynamics of new supranational legal concepts relevant to language, as the authenticity of 24 EU languages must be ensured. This requires the scientific foundation and continuation of studies on comparative language and legal concepts, which include profound knowledge of legal scientific methods and linguistic differentiation of multilingual phenomena.
For linguistics, linguistic comparison and the need to design European legal concepts provide important new aspects for linguistic disciplines such as text linguistics, pragmatics, semantics, translation theory, terminology and contrastive language analysis.
In this context, the mutual influence of national and European contexts, which is of great legal linguistic importance, remains crucial.
ZERL – European legal linguistics Panel
As far as political, legal and social development is concerned, it is particularly important to link the work of lawyers, linguists, legal linguists in research, teaching and practice as early as possible and to make it transparent to all those involved. ZERL is to play a part in this. The journal is a platform for an innovative scientific dialogue and broadens the scope for practical implementation of European legal linguistics.
Isolde Burr-Haase