Languages, opening doors to cultures: Linguistic diversity

Martyna

Linguistic Diversity
Article 22 of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union, adopted by EU leaders in 2000, says that the Union shall respect linguistic diversity, and Article 21 prohibits discrimination based on a number of grounds, including language.
The importance of languages was emphasised in the Council Resolution on linguistic diversity of 14 February 2002 on acknowledging the part played by languages in social, economic and political integration, particularly in an enlarged Europe.
The article 53 of the Treaty on European Union is authentic in each of its 12 language versions (Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Irish, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish and Swedish).
The article 21 entitles every citizen to write to any of the institutions in one of these languages and to have an answer in the same language.
The enlargement of 1 May 2004 enriches the European Union with 9 new official languages: Czech, Estonian, Hungarian, Lithuanian, Latvian, Polish, Slovenian, Slovak and Maltese.

Policies
The Commission has set a target of “Mother tongue-plus-two” for its policy on language skills. According to the most recent figures around 26% of Europeans claim to know their own language and two others.

Activities
The European Year of Languages in 2001, organised by the European Commission and the Council of Europe, gave languages a higher profile than ever before. Since then, the European Day of Languages has been held on 26 September every year.

Action Plan
The 45 actions were supposed to be undertaken from 2004 to 2006 in three broad areas:
firstly, the key objective of extending the benefits of language learning to all citizens as a lifelong activity,
secondly, the need to improve the quality of language teaching at all levels,
thirdly, the need to build in Europe an environment which is really favourable to languages.

Language learning
The education activities carried out under the Socrates programme are designed to encourage linguistic exchanges between young people and training of language teachers. These activities consist of, among others, the Erasmus, the Comenius, the Lingua.
The Youth programme also affords opportunities for language learning through exchanges and mobility measures organised for the benefit of young Europeans.
The Leonardo da Vinci vocational training programme provides funds for multinational projects to develop new methods and materials for teaching languages and for assessing businesses' language needs.