Multilingualism, Linguistic Justice and the EU Communication Deficit on Social Media

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

This article examines multilingualism on Twitter/X among European Union (EU) institutions, bodies and agencies using a dataset of nearly 400,000 tweets from corporate accounts, Commissioners and Presidents of European institutions. Employing advanced language detection tools, it assesses how far EU communication reflects its stated commitment to multilingualism and relates these practices to the language competences of EU residents. The findings indicate a strong dominance of English across most institutional actors. A notable exception is the European Parliament, which implements dedicated language‐specific accounts, enabling communication in all EU languages. In contrast, most other institutions rely predominantly on English, suggesting a de facto monolingual approach. Relating these communication practices to the language competences of EU residents reveals a substantial mismatch: predominantly English‐language communication is readily accessible to only a minority of the European population, with marked variation across Member States. These findings identify a linguistic dimension of the EU communication deficit on social media, with implications for linguistic justice, participation and institutional legitimacy.