Ad Bruxellam: Making Latin the EU’s next language

Latin is not exactly the first thing that comes to mind when you think of Europe’s next common language.

Isn’t it a dead language carved into Roman statues, only preserved in Vatican encyclicals and remembered mainly by traumatised adults who still wake up sweating over their Latin homework, rosa, rosae?

A new pan-European movement called Via Nova wants to revive Latin to give Europeans a shared spoken language with historical weight, one that, in its words, carries “civilisational baggage”.

The aim is not to replace German, Czech, or Maltese, but to give the continent a lingua franca that can act as a source of identity for pan-Europeanism, and eventually become an official EU language.

The EU already has 24 languages, and adding another one would require unanimous agreement from member states.

For Via Nova President Timi Celcer, the bloc has spent decades building political institutions and an integrated market, but has never quite found a common cultural language that…