Source words were then replaced by target words selected from a dictionary, and their order rearranged so as to comply with the rules of the target language.

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Steve Jenner, from the Plain English Campaign, said punctuation, including the apostrophe, was one of the basic rules of language and he described the council's decision as "nonsensical".

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Despite the concerns over language, MEPs were broadly supportive of the rules on mutual recognition and called for the time taken to recognise the qualifications of EU professionals such as doctors and engineers applying to work in another member state to be sped up.

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Brown based the grammar for his ten-thousand-word language, called Loglan, on the rules of formal predicate logic used by analytical philosophers.

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In addition, even if an English-only policy is adopted for nondiscriminatory reasons and applied uniformly, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) and some courts take the position that such rules burden national origin minorities because they prevent many members of these groups from speaking the language in which they are best able to communicate.

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One MP has found a novel way to circumvent the arcane rules which dictate whether language is parliamentary or not: by outsourcing questions to users of social media website Twitter.

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