Rules governing the languages used by the European Union's institutions
Linguistic diversity is one of the basic characteristics of the European Union and is a major cultural asset. The European Union's institutions have common rules for languages, laid down by the Council in 1958.
The institutions of the European Union currently have 24 official languages: Bulgarian, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Irish, Italian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Maltese, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish and Swedish.
To ensure that the European Council and the Council function as multilingual institutions, the General Secretariat of the Council has a Language Service which, for legislative texts, works closely with the "Quality of Legislation" Directorate of the Legal Service.