Brexit dividend?

There was an article in this morning's FT at reference 1about a Spanish request to add three more languages to the EU's existing 24, covering between them 27 countries, as explained at reference 2. With Belgium, Luxembourg and Cyprus all missing out on this important national status symbol.

Wikipedia includes a diagram, reproduced above, which reminds us that the union goes beyond the Indo-European family to include some exotics from the Uralic and Afro-Asiatic families. 

Quite a large proportion of the Irish to Old High German Gothic segment at the top of the diagram at reference 3. But what about Flemish and Frisian? Then if the Scots bunk off, will they insist on their branch of Gaelic?

While the rather older list in Ruhlen (reference 4) covers no less than three pages, 325-327. At the top, we have Armenian and Romani. Near the middle, Albanian and Sardinian. Near the end, Czech and Polish - along with Russian, Byelorussian and Ukrainian. Bulgarian at the very end, the very last of the Balto-Slavics - listed first in the Wikipedia version. And out of range on page 328, Turkish. Could you let Sardinian in without letting the Corsicans in, which Ruhlen does not recognise at all?

One might think that all this translation and interpretation is going to cost a prodigious amount of money, but according to Wikipedia, only something more than a billion euros, less than 1% of the EU budget. Added to which, machine translation is probably moving forward quite fast now, after rather clunky efforts back in the 1970's when I first took an interest in such things.

However, the important thing is that as non-members we don't have to get into torrid debates about all this. The Brexit crew can claim a big Brexit dividend and we can concentrate on important things like smashing up the National Health Service in favour of private providers. Happy days!

PS: Wikipedia also gives a fair amount of space to Esperanto, seemingly popular in Hungary.

References

Reference 1: Spanish request for new EU languages adds to translation woes: Sánchez wants Basque, Galician and Catalan added to bloc’s 24 official tongues - Ian Johnston, Barney Jopson, Financial Times - 2023.

Reference 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_the_European_Union.

Reference 3: https://psmv2.blogspot.com/2015/08/aryans.html. Turned up on the search key 'ancient greek'.

Reference 4: A guide to the world's languages. Vol. 1: Classification – Merritt Ruhlen – 1987