A funny thing happened on the linguistic fringes of the European Union earlier this month. A group of demonstrators had gathered outside Dublin Castle in Ireland, where talks on an EU constitution were being held, to demand that the EU officially recognize the Irish language. Then Ireland's minister for European affairs, Mr. Dick Roche, approached the protesters and tried to strike up a conversation in what he assumed was their very own tongue. He didn't make much headway. "I went over . . . and started to talk to them in Irish," Mr. Roche said later, "but they hadn't got any Irish."

Cynics said the incident exposed the campaign to add Irish to the EU's already bulging roster of official languages as just another politically correct fad, reflecting nobody's real interest. Why should the EU recognize Irish, they scoffed, when even the Irish can't recognize it? More charitable souls said they thought the incident supported, rather than undermined, the tongue-tied protesters' case. It just proves how badly such marginal languages need shoring up, they argued, if even their own advocates can't speak them anymore. Mr. Roche himself defended the group, saying, "It doesn't make any difference to the cause, because these kinds of things are based on emotions."

Indeed they are -- and nowhere more so, perhaps, than in the European Union. As the huge and still-growing political entity tries to forge a cultural identity that balances unity and diversity, the whole and the parts, no issue has proved more contentious or unwieldy than language.