The Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe yesterday and today in the European Parliament held a public debate on the socio-economic and political effects of linguistic discrimination through bias towards certain dominant languages.

The ALDE group invited a series of expert speakers, academics, journalists and representatives active in representing the case for the protection of lesser-used languages and against the hegemony of a single dominant language, like English.

The European Union's 23 official languages mean up to 506 theoretical language combinations for interpretation and translation. Various mechanisms exist to facilitate the practical implementation of multilingualism at an EU level whilst keeping overall costs within 1% of the total EU budget. But there is currently no legal basis in the Treaties to formulate a coherent language policy. The motto of the EU is "unity in diversity" but in linguistic terms this is not the reality.

Speakers drew attention to the impact of globalisation on language use and the increasing use of English in diplomatic, business, film and music circles.

Marco Cappato MEP (Radical Party, Italy) specifically called for the emerging new technologies to play a role in defending and developing linguistic diversity:
"New technologies have the power to either destroy or enrich our linguistic heritage," he said. "It is a matter of political choice and political will.  Open-source software and programmes like Wikipedia are examples of ways to ensure the widest possible contributions, independent of language background."

"Clearly there is a need to ensure efficiency and ease of communication at work, including in multinational and multilingual environments like the European Parliament, but we must make a commensurate effort to keep alive the spirit of multilingualism and the rich variety of our linguistic heritage."

Henrik Lax MEP (Svenska Folkpartiet, Finland), co-organiser of the event said:
"Some 50 million citizens in the EU speak another language than the majority in their country. Today these national linguistic minorities are still represented by a handful of MEPs. After the elections in 2009 however they run a substantial risk of not having anyone to represent them as existing national lists are reduced to account for MEPs from new accession countriesg. It is not acceptable that ten per cent of the Union's citizens are excluded from representation in the European Parliament due to inappropriate electoral provisions that favour a dominant linguistic group. This serious draw back for democracy and stability has to be remedied in some way."