Linguae Europaeae

by Gwendolyn Childers In 1972, then-president of France Georges Pompidou encompassed The State’s longtime repression of regional minority languages in the following statement: “There is no room for regional languages in a France that is destined to set its seal on Europe” (ELA, 2012). Even a decade later, J.P. Chevenement, the Minister of Education under president Francois Mitterrand, said in reference to the Corsican language that “teaching the youth languages that offer them no perspective is not doing them a good service,” (Kelly-Holmes, 35). These disheartening statements about regional minority languages have been fairly de rigueur throughout France’s history. So how is Breton still surviving against all odds? Like many severely endangered languages today, Breton has had a history ripe with repression and degradation in status. In recent years, Breton has made strides to reconstitute its status, in a similar way to Irish Gaelic and Welsh. Although the education system has like...

by Saloni Mishra Users of computers and creative learning tools do not have to go through the stress of reinventing the wheel: technology is now widely available and can facilitate our teaching and make learning more interactive for our learners. To find a good example of recent teaching methods that make copious use of new technologies, we can look at CLIL or Content and Language Integrated Learning. CLIL is a great methodological tool for learning ‘content’ through the use of another language (minority, second, third), thus ‘integrating’ a subject with the acquisition of the language. This method was strongly promoted by the European Commission to enhance bilingual education and became part of its action plan known as: Promoting Language Learning and Linguistic Diversity: An Action Plan 2004 – 2006 . The national government educational entities and educators themselves agreed that it was a great way to open doors to young students learning languages in ‘useful’ ways: learning math ...

by Maia Kirsh Image Source Hoy en día se sabe que los habitantes de Mallorca, así como los de varias otras regiones de España, hablan y se identifican con el idioma catalán ¿Pero es esta idea compartida totalmente válida? ¿Hasta que punto se identifican los residentes de esta Isla con el catalán? Gracias al Decreto de Mimos, aprobado en el 2007, los métodos de enseñanza de Mallorca y el resto de las Islas Baleares sufrieron grandes cambios (1). El susodicho decreto obligaba a los colegios de las Islas a impartir al menos la mitad de las clases del ciclo primario en catalán, lo cual crearía un gran contraste con la típica práctica de enseñar todo el contenido escolar en castellano. Este cambio, se creía, no sería algo que pudiera crear mucha polémica ya que el idioma original de Mallorca, así como de Menorca, Ibiza y Formentera, era desde hace años el catalán y, por lo tanto, la ley sólo ayudaría a reforzar la establecida noción nacional de querer proteger la cultura de cada re...

by Eileen Sanders Catalonia is an autonomous region of Spain with material and cultural wealth. Despite its affiliation with Spain and peaceful coexistence, its people feel truly separate from the rest of Spain due to their strong sense of independent regional identity. The laws and policies currently in place reveal how truly separate identities are between Catalonia and the rest of Spain. Specifically, the linguistic debate in the educational system is an important illustration of this sentiment and from it many debates and tensions have manifested. Image Source In Spain the autonomous community of Catalonia is considered to be a bilingual region. Here Catalan and Spanish (Castilian) coexist, however, there are virtually no Catalan monolinguals: whoever speaks Catalan necessarily speaks Spanish, too. A 2013 census found that 73.2% of the population of Catalonia could speak Catalan (5.35 million people), 95% could understand it and 55.8% could write it. There are significa...

Image Source Eda Derhemi talks with Daryl Rodgers about the coming referendum in Scotland.  When Daryl and I taught for the Italian program at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign , we never used English. For years our everyday conversations, our meetings, our parties were all conducted naturally in Italian. The friends that we shared were also Italian. But the one time that I heard Daryl speak to somebody in English was enough for me to never forget the beauty of his Scottish accent. It was like something coming directly from a theatrical stage where Douglas of John Home was being recited, or, to be more contemporary, like something similar to Sean Connery’s accent. It also might be that I am in love with the sounds of all the languages of the world, especially the endangered languages of minorities… In fact, I could have interviewed the green ogre Shrek for the purpose of this blog entry (who as I’ve read has expressed his support for the unionists in these word...