Berlusconi in bid to boost Italian in EU

ELITSA VUCHEVA Today @ 09:29 CET Italy's prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi, has urged his ministers to boycott EU meetings where no documentation is provided in Italian in a bid to promote the language of Dante. They should walk out of those meetings where they are forced to speak a language other than their own, Mr Berlusconi wrote in a letter to his colleagues, the Guardian reports. Mr Berlusconi has called for respect of “the dignity” of all EU languages (Photo: EUobserver.com) It is essential that the EU also guarantees "the dignity" of those languages which are less spoken in the Union, the prime minister wrote. He said Italian officials should "counteract the practice, begun by the European commission… [of] introducing the ambiguous notion of 'working' or 'procedural' languages, with the effect of creating a trilingual... [read full story]