Leonard Orban is the new EU commissioner for multilingualism

Having just rung in the new year, the European Union has not only become bigger but it has also become three languages richer, bringing the Cyrillic alphabet, another Latin language and the first Gaelic one as an EU official language, into the 27-nation bloc.

Bulgarian, Irish and Romanian on Monday (1 January) became the three new official languages of the EU - raising the number to 23, EUobserver reported.

"The diversity of languages is our common richness," said EU culture commissioner Jan Figel in one of his last statements in December before handing over part of his portfolio to the new EU multilingualism commissioner from Romania, Leonard Orban.

The union annually spends some €1.1 billion on translation and interpretation – around 1 percent of the EU budget a year – with only a slight increase in cost expected for the three new languages.

This pays for almost 3,000 staff to interpret around 11,000 meetings a year and to translate more than 1.3 million pages of text.

With Bulgarian, Cyrillic has become the third official alphabet of the EU – the two others are the Latin and the Greek alphabet.

The Cyrillic script was developed in the 10th century and named after its inventor, St Cyril. Bulgarian is spoken by almost ten million people around the world, with nearly eight million of them living in Bulgaria.

Romanian, on the other hand, is a Latin language and has only periodically been written in Cyrillic when forced by external powers over 100 years ago.

Out of the four Latin languages already officially represented the EU, it is closest to Italian – although speakers of Romanian seem to understand Italian more easily than the other way round.

Romanian is spoken by between 24-26 million people with 22 million of them living in Romania and most of the remaining people living in neighbouring Moldova.

While French, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish were influenced by the Germanic languages spoken in northern Europe, Romanian was influenced by the Greek, Hungarian, Slavonic and Turkish languages - distinguishing it from the other Romance languages.

The third language – Irish – will be the first Gaelic language officially within the EU but not everything will be translated into the language which is spoken on a daily basis by only around 5 percent of the 4-million-strong Irish population.

When Ireland joined the then European Economic Community in 1973 - which was a 9-member club at the time - Irish was given special status since it is one of the country's two official languages.

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