European Union prepares to adopt 24th official language as costs mount, calls for English rise

In the European Union, every language is an official language. Government officials speak in the official language of their country, and those comments are then translated into 22, soon to be 23, other languages. All of that costs $1.4 billion per year — and that total will increase when Croatian becomes an official language later this year.

The Treaty of Rome in 1957 founded what is now the European Union, and was supposed to be the beginning of the end of nationalism in Europe.

But over a half-century later, walking through any of the EU buildings in Brussels, it feels like nationalism never went away.

Officially, deputies and delegates will only speak in their national languages, as a matter of principle. Attending them is a small army of translators and interpreters who assure their...

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English maybe spreading around the world but the E.U. functions in all 23 languages of its member nations. It costs about 141,661,254,000.00 yen a year to translate official communications from one language into all the others. That's a lot of money!