24 official EU languages. The biggest permanent interpreter pool on the planet, bigger than the UN. And yet this whole system is a geopolitical battlefield most people completely ignore. Key things to know: • A country's language isn't automatically official. You have to ask. Luxembourg never asked for Luxembourgish, so an MEP literally got sanctioned for speaking it in Parliament. • Spain is pushing for Catalan. Every other member state is blocking it to avoid opening the floodgates for other regional languages. • France is running a nonstop guerilla campaign against English becoming the default. French civil servants are literally instructed to protest in meetings if a French national doesn't speak French when interpretation is available. • France recently killed a Commission proposal to send trade agreements to the Council in English only. English only became the de facto working language after the 2004 Eastern enlargement, and it stayed official even after Brexit because Malta and Ireland kept it alive. Language is soft power. "copyright" and "droit d'auteur" are not the same thing. The language a law is drafted in shapes what the law means. That's why this matters. First ever EU legal act in 1958, "Regulation 1," was literally just: here are the official languages.