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The German government is stepping up its efforts to make German more prominent in the EU, demanding that EU documentation be translated into the language of Goethe- or else it will not attend meetings.

"Germany has a right to have these documents in German," the deputy foreign minister, Gunter Gloser, told German news agency DPA on Thursday (20 april).

In a joint statement earlier this month, the German parliament and the French national assembly denounced the "unacceptable drift toward a monolingual system" dominated by English.

Bundestag president Norbert Lammert wrote in a letter to European Commission president Jose Manuel Barroso that the German parliament would refuse to debate EU documents that were not printed in German.

Berlin on Thursday said it wanted a reply from Brussels on the matter before the next EU summit in June.

The Berlin move is the second promotion for German in recent weeks, as the EU Ombudsman in late March asked that German be considered for a language choice on EU presidency websites.

Ombudsman Nikiforos Diamandouros made the request to the council - representing member states - after a German language association complained that presidency websites was only available in English and French.

With the union's enlargement towards the east in 2004, the second EU language is German, spoken by 12 percent of citizens.

French is spoken by close to 11 percent, while Russian shares the fourth slot with Spanish.

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Currently, 62 percent of EU institution texts are drafted in English, and large parts of EU-information on-line is never translated into the mother tongue of readers - particularly those speaking smaller languages.

Germany is not the only member state to have raised concern over the declining importance of its language in the EU' daily work.

Spain and Italy, the union's fourth and fifth largest countries, have made repeated complaints about staff reshuffles in the EU institution translation services, claiming Spanish and Italian is being cut back while English, French and German remains untouched.

The status of the Spanish language was last discussed when Spanish prime minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero met Mr Barroso in December, with Mr Zapatero expressing a wish that "the Spanish language be present at the highest level in all the European institutions."

Each EU institution is allowed by law to decide upon which languages to use as working languages or "procedural" languages.

In the European Commission, French, German and English are procedural languages, meaning all internal documents as well as EU legislation must be issued in them, while the 17 other EU languages have "official" status meaning EU legislation appears in these languages.

The European Court of Justice in Luxembourg is, however, entirely run in French.