They say English is the European Union’s lingua franca these days, and for better or worse it probably is. But a knowledge of Spanish and Portuguese turns out to be very handy as well.

At the EU’s Lisbon summit on approving the long-awaited institutional reform treaty, Luís Amado, Portugal’s foreign minister, emerged late in the evening to update the press on the progress that EU leaders were making.

Transfixed no doubt by his immaculately trimmed beard and equally immaculate English (one could imagine him in a 19th century group portrait with Lev Tolstoy and Karl Marx), none of the assembled hacks
and hackettes paid much attention when a reporter asked Amado a question in Portuguese - all the others he answered were put in English.

Was it true, the reporter asked Amado, that one of the main obstacles blocking approval of the treaty would disappear because Italy would be offered an extra seat in the European parliament and the parliament’s president would give up his voting rights? She added that she had picked this up at a Spanish press briefing.

Smooth as ever, Amado answered that this was one of the things that the leaders were looking at. But once again few of those present bothered to listen to him because he was speaking Portuguese.

And yet it turned out that the Portuguese-speaking reporter was absolutely right - as Amado was probably well aware.

So there are two lessons here for all of us. One is to brush up on the language of the country that holds the six-month rotating EU presidency (from January, eh-hem, it’s Slovenia). The other is to attend Spanish press briefings. Olé!

For those who admire the European Union’s matchless ability to inject an element of farce into the highest political dramas, the dispute over how to spell "euro" in Bulgarian is a collector’s item. Here we are on the eve of the EU’s vital October 18-19 summit in Lisbon, summoned to put an end to years of agonising over the EU’s internal institutional arrangements, and the question bothering everyone is whether to let the Bulgarians spell euro "evro".

It reminds me of the monumental fuss that broke out in 19th century Austria-Hungary over whether the Habsburg Empire’s central institutions should be called "kaiserlich-königlich" (k-k, imperial-royal) or "kaiserlich und königlich" (k und k, imperial and royal). We all know how that ended - a world war and a 1,700-page novel by Robert Musil.

Bulgaria’s gripe is that the EU’s insistence on transliterating "euro" directly into Bulgarian would make its sound inconsistent with other Bulgarian words about things European. For example, the word "Europe" in Bulgarian is "Evropa" and European is "evropeiski". It’s only sensible that "euro" should be rendered "evro".

Not so, says the EU. A euro is a euro in any language - with a "u", not a "v". Bulgarians will just have live with it.

As one would expect, the European Central Bank has a hand in all this. The ECB regards "euro" as a brand name that mustn’t be tampered with under any circumstances. The fact that Bulgaria’s EU accession treaty uses the word "evro" is neither here nor there. It was a lawyers’ oversight. (Sack them!)

Obviously, Bulgaria was never going to veto the EU’s reform treaty in Lisbon, or even block the EU association agreement with Montenegro to be signed on October 15. In fact, Bulgaria seems happy enough to have secured a declaration by EU ambassadors in Luxembourg to the effect that there is a "technical-linguistic problem" over how to translate "euro" into Bulgarian.

But excuse me. Isn’t that a "technical and linguistic problem"?

For many people, the EU speaks a language all of its own.
It’s a particular blend of desiccated jargon, with phrases such as "council framework decision" "comitology" and "third pillar" regularly uttered by those on the Brussels circuit.
My favourite entry by far in the dictionary of Eurospeak is a "non-paper." To my bemusement, I learned that it was a policy paper - but wasn’t as yet a final, agreed policy.
In fact, the EU has 20 official languages, which swirl through the interpretation and translation rooms across Brussels and beyond.

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