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Linguistic coverage

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The interface of the website is available in all 24 EU official languages.

For documents, the available languages depend on the EU official languages that existed when the documents were adopted.

This is why linguistic coverage is greater for the 4 official languages of the EU’s founding members: Dutch, French, German and Italian.

The oldest documents on EUR-Lex in particular are not available in the languages that were added when countries joined later on: English and Danish (1973); Greek (1981); Spanish and Portuguese (1986); Finnish and Swedish (1995); Czech, Estonian, Hungarian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Maltese, Polish, Slovak and Slovenian (2004); Bulgarian and Romanian (2007); and Croatian (2013).

However, when a country joins the EU, the EU legislation in force at the time is translated into the official language of this country and is compiled in the Special Editions of the Official Journal.

Documents in Irish

Depending on the type of document and year of publication, not all documents are available in Irish on EUR-Lex.

Legal acts currently available in Irish are:

  • key legislation adopted jointly by the European Parliament and the Council;
  • some treaties.

Irish became a full EU official language on 1 January 2007. However, for practical reasons and on a transitional basis, the EU institutions were exempted from the obligation to draft all acts in Irish or translate them. This temporary derogation was introduced for a renewable period of 5 years.

Council Regulation (EC) No 920/2005 of 13 June 2005 stated that ‘the institutions of the European Union shall not be bound by the obligation to draft all acts in Irish and to publish them in that language in the Official Journal of the European Union’, except for regulations adopted jointly by the European Parliament and the Council.

The derogation was extended twice, with the scope gradually reduced each time: