The European Union, in its infinite bureaucratic wisdom, has blessed itself with twenty-four 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. Citizens may write to the institutions in any of them and receive a reply in the same tongue. Democracy, they call it. Efficiency experts call it something else entirely.
Now picture the United States, a country literally assembled by waves of those same Europeans, deciding to abandon the one practical inheritance that actually worked. English would be demoted to just another regional dialect. Congress would conduct debates in simultaneous Hungarian and Maltese. Every cereal box would require a fold-out booklet listing ingredients in all twenty-four languages so that no Latvian shopper felt linguistically oppressed by the Corn Flakes. Road signs would stretch for half a mile. Emergency calls would begin with a language-selection menu longer than the average attention span.
The result would be pure administrative theater. Translators would outnumber lawmakers. Packaging costs would rival defense budgets. Simple grocery shopping would become an exercise in multilingual archaeology. Yet the EU treats this linguistic carnival as a moral triumph rather than an expensive joke told at the taxpayer’s expense.
America’s original European settlers, for all their rivalries, eventually settled on one working language because they valued results over symbolism. The modern EU prefers the reverse: maximum linguistic dignity, minimum operational clarity. One continent proves that shared speech accelerates progress. The other proves that infinite official languages mainly accelerate the production of thick, unread reports.
Life, it turns out, is quite simple when people agree on a common tongue instead of demanding twenty-four simultaneous versions of every form, label, and speech. You’re welcome, shmuck.
