EU Urges Kosovo to Appoint Language Commissioner
The EU Office in Pristina called, on European Day of Languages, for Kosovo to appoint a language commissioner and set up a translation unit, as Serbian keeps losing ground.
The European Union Office in Pristina called on September 26, on European Day of Languages, for full implementation of Kosovo’s Law on the Use of Languages, and demanded that institutions soon appoint a language commissioner and set up a Translation and Harmonization Unit within the Office of the Prime Minister. The call comes as Serbian, despite legal guarantees, has for years been losing ground on road signs, in institutional announcements, and on the streets of northern Kosovo.
“European Day of Languages is an opportunity to celebrate and value multilingualism across our continent, and especially in Kosovo, which is marked by multiethnicity and multiculturalism,” the EU Office said in a statement carried by KoSSev and Radio KiM.
As a community with 24 official languages, the EU said it is helping Kosovo fully implement the law, among other things through reforms funded from the Growth Plan for the Western Balkans. Under the constitution and the Law on the Use of Languages, Albanian and Serbian are official languages of equal status in Kosovo’s institutions, and their scripts, Cyrillic and Latin, hold equal status as well.
“We hope for the prompt appointment of a language commissioner and the establishment of a Translation and Harmonization Unit within the Office of the Prime Minister,” the EU Office in Kosovo said.
Road signs that changed script
The gap between the law and practice is clearest in the case of road signs. In March 2024, then Infrastructure Minister Liburn Aliu announced that all Cyrillic road signs in northern Kosovo would be removed. With the assistance of Kosovo police, the existing signs were taken down and replaced with bilingual ones, first in Albanian, then in Serbian written in Latin script. At the time, language commissioner Slavisa Mladenovic warned that the move was constitutionally questionable. Through 2025, the removal of Cyrillic signs continued, including the one at the entrance to North Mitrovica.
The problem is not limited to road signage. In May 2026, Mimoza Kusari-Lila, minister of industry, entrepreneurship and trade in a technical mandate, answered questions posed to her in Serbian exclusively in Albanian. A month earlier, in March 2026, the Journalists’ Association of Serbia (UNS) and its branch in Kosovo protested after three United Nations agencies in Kosovo began sending press releases to Serbian-language media exclusively in Albanian.
In June 2026, North Mitrovica began installing new street signs, among them ones bearing the names “Zoran Djindjic” and “Isa Boletini,” with an announcement that between 70 and 80 more names would follow. Local officials say none of them were consulted before the process began.
A law that has existed for almost two decades
Kosovo’s Law on the Use of Languages has been in force for almost twenty years, and it envisions a dedicated institution, a language commissioner or commission, to oversee its implementation. Based on everything the EU said today, the post of commissioner remains vacant, and the announced Translation and Harmonization Unit at the Office of the Prime Minister has yet to be formed. Until that happens, it remains an open question whether the next sign in North Mitrovica, or the next statement from a Kosovo institution, will follow a rule that has stood in the law for almost two decades.
