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I recently sat down with the outgoing Irish climate minister, Eamon Ryan, in a quiet corner of the European Council building in Brussels. The first thing he wanted to talk about was not the latest movements in energy policy or gossip from the last climate conference but his inability to fathom the EU capital’s never-ending shorthand.
“It takes me 24 hours to get back up to speed with Brussels speak,” he said. “Even though I’ve been coming here for 10 years.”
To meet Ryan, I had come through the JL building to attend the TTE council, where they would sign off the PPWR and hear about the SET plan. The following day was an ENV council. Ministers were accompanied by their Coreper I ambassadors and mertens.
Make sense?
Running concurrently was the FAC and GAC where ministers discussed EDIP and EPF.
To anyone that spends their working life in Brussels these acronyms are close to a lingua franca. Officially there are 24 languages in the EU. But there is an unofficial 25th language of abbreviations that even ministers struggle to understand.
This shorthand can sometimes make the internal workings of the European Commission sound more mystical than they are: SYSPER is the HR department, EASE is a tool for accessing documents, BASIS is for briefings and CARES is catering.
Translating this requires “ePoetry”, the commission’s internal language guide. Officials interested in the future of the planet need to be aware that climate laws passed and revised in the last five years include EPBD, LULUCF, EED, CSDDD, CSRD and an updated ETS directive. Those more concerned about where to have a drink with MEPs will want to know that their bar is in the EP at ASP Bloc G.
All institutions have their own shorthand. Nato has a 330-page guide to abbreviations. But the EU — perhaps because of its bureaucratic nature and combination of linguistically separate countries — feels more saturated than most.
Some regard the use of acronyms with suspicion. It is “obfuscation through blandness”, says one EU diplomat. The volume of initials can create an atmosphere of “insiderness” that fuels suspicion of faceless Brussels bureaucrats.
But more often than not these acronyms are a good thing. They save space and stop readers slowing down or tripping over gargantuan words and multiple translations. It’s certainly easier to remember CSDDD or CS3D than spelling out Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive on a regular basis.
“If you have to translate everything into 24 languages, there needs to be a clarity and consistency where acronyms are actually helpful,” says Britta Aagaard, chief business officer at the language technology company Semantix and a member of the European Commission’s language industry expert group.
Think, she says, of the fact that the EU has to translate not only from English into 23 other languages but all those languages into each other. That results in 522 different translation combinations. “These acronyms are actually serving a purpose in terms of being the consistency point.”
Aagaard believes they are also part of a wider “cultural shift” in everyday life, particularly as interactions move into increasingly rapid communication online. After all, IYKYK.
It’s not as if the EU is unaware of its acronym soup: the European parliament even hosted “citizens’ language days” at the end of 2024 with an expert panel discussion on “the evolution of clear language: from its roots to new shoots” in which experts offered “a perspective on past, present and future of clear language, as well as the benefits of clear language in administrative and legal documents”.
Still, fans of handy abbreviations must take care to avoid unintended consequences.
We should all heed the cautionary tale of the UK’s 2005 plan to rebrand the Department of Trade and Industry as the Department for Productivity, Energy, Industry and Science. According to then trade secretary Alan Johnson, it was only when he jotted the acronym down in his notebook that anyone realised the UK was on the brink of creating the Department for PEnIS.
alice.hancock@ft.com
