The European Union's lead Brexit negotiator wants
British and EU officials to work in French rather than English
during the divorce talks, an EU official familiar with Brussels'
Brexit task force said on Friday.
Michel Barnier, the former French foreign minister running the
complex separation with London, is keen that his native tongue be
used in meetings and documents, the source told Reuters during a EU
summit at which Theresa May was making her first appearance as
prime minister at the European Council.
"Barnier wants French to be the working language in Brexit
negotiations with Britain," the source said.
An EU spokeswoman stressed this was not an official line: "There
is no language regime for the negotiations," she said.
A spokeswoman for May declined comment. "We will not comment
until we receive a formal request," she said.
Using French marks a shift away from standard practice among
multinational teams in Brussels, where French lost its status to
English as the EU's main working language after northern and
eastern states joined in the past two decades. Even officials from
the EU's founding powers France and Germany now communicate with
each other mainly in English.
It also sends a signal to May and her ministers that the EU
plans to put its own interests first in negotiating divorce talks
that the prime minister has promised to launch by March.
Barnier's boss, former Luxembourg premier and European
Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker, who was to meet May over
lunch on Friday, has said the Union must be "intransigent" in
defending its principles during the talks.
Many British diplomats in Brussels are fluent in French but
ministers and Whitehall officials share with their fellow Britons
the distinction of being among the poorest linguists in Europe.
Other officials involved in preparing for Brexit said they were
unaware of Barnier proposing to use mainly French. But some have
said that his task force, currently numbering 15 staff and
including no Britons, has been conversing mainly in French.
Barnier, who speaks fluent if accented English, was an unpopular
choice for some British politicians when Commission President
Jean-Claude Juncker appointed him. Some commentators described it
as "an act of war".
As an EU commissioner until 2014, Barnier, 65, had a difficult
relationship with London, as he sought to tighten regulation of
Britain's dominant financial services industry. One British
newspaper called him the "scourge of the City".
Some EU politicians have suggested that English might lose its
status as one of three official working languages, along with
French and German, as a result of Brexit. However, few see a
realistic challenge to the global lingua franca even when Britons
are no longer present in the European Union.