Multilingualism is close to the heart of the EU project, but is not something we do well in the UK.

Working in an organisation with two official languages, English and French, I have begun to speak a different kind of English. For instance, we use the word ‘deontology’ to mean ethics (because of the French word ‘déontologie’), although it is barely used by native English speakers. From this has sprung the term ‘double deontology’, to describe the concept of the cross-border lawyer who is subject to two sets of ethical rules, those from the home state and those from the host state. The phrase is now widely used around the world in legal circles when describing an ethical double-bind.

Similarly, the French word ‘juriste’ or 'jurist', meaning someone with legal training but without a lawyer’s title, is often used in other countries but not in the UK. And legal professional privilege is a common law notion which does not translate to other legal systems. We instead use ‘professional secrecy’ (a translation of ‘le secret professionnel’) to cover the concept within every legal system.

Language is one of the most important, sensitive and fascinating issues facing the EU. Here are some facts which show the problems thrown up by it.

There are 23 official languages in the EU. I bet that you can’t list them all (if you miss one out, it is likely to be Irish, one of the newcomers). In order to cope with them, the EU has an army of interpreters (for the spoken word, at a cost of around €180m per year) and translators (for the written word, at a cost of around €810m per year). That means each EU citizen is paying around €2.20 per year.

There are serious shortages of EU interpreters in various languages. The European Commission blames it on the widespread belief that the ability to speak English is enough. The number of young people studying languages has dwindled not only in the UK but in many countries: learning English is considered essential and other languages are neglected. An example of the growing spread of English within the EU itself is that the number of documents originally written in French and then sent for translation over the past decade dropped from 40% to 11%, while over the same period the percentage originally written in English rose from 45% to 72%.

If you go to any EU meeting where translation is provided, you will see English widely spoken, even by non-natives. As soon as any other language is spoken, many people put on their headphones in the Eurocrats’ version of the Mexican wave.

There is no easy solution. The two crude and opposing arguments, each of which has force, are: on the one hand, language is an essential part of culture and rights, every citizen should have the right to speak their own, and there should be resistance to the ‘anglo-saxonisation’ of so many aspects of life; and on the other, English is now so widely spoken, the cost of catering to other languages is so high, that the solution is to use English as the only working language.

Interestingly, of the two international organisations for lawyers, the International Bar Association uses English only, while the Union Internationale des Avocats has three working languages: English, French and Spanish. When you attend their conferences you see entirely different groups of lawyers present, which may show that language is not an insignificant matter to lawyers, too.

The EU has many such complex tangles to deal with (the question of the accession of Turkey to full membership is another). Personally, I support its efforts to promote greater multilingualism. I am happy to pay my €2.20 per year, if only because – as I tried to show briefly at the start of this piece – we all learn from the way different languages and cultures look at the world.

Jonathan Goldsmith is the secretary general of the Council of Bars and Law Societies of Europe, which represents more than 700,000 European lawyers through its member bars and law societies