Do you speak the State language?
I have been to Moldova a few years ago and I realised that I speak one more language. My Romanian is good, and the people in Chisinau I met spoke the same language. However, officially, it was not called Romanian, but “the State language”.
No problem for me, it means that I can write in my CV that I speak one more language.
The same goes, more or less, with languages of former Yugoslavia. A few years ago, there was only one language, called Serbo-Croat. I used to speak basic Serbo-Croat, which means that now I also speak basic Serb, basic Croat and basic Bosnian. I hear that in Montenegro they now say that their language is Montenegrin. So I speak basic Montenegrin too.
Now I understand why Barroso does’t have a multilingualism commissioner in his new team. We are getting multilingual without any effort!
Georgi Gotev is senior editor of EurActiv