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10th anniversary of the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages
This week the Council of Europe is marking the tenth anniversary of the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. A decade ago, the first ever European treaty on minority languages came into force. The Charter has allowed many states to pledge their commitment to protecting their linguistic diversity.
A total of 23 European states have now signed and ratified the Charter. As many as ten minority languages are spoken in some of these states, including Romania, Serbia and the Ukraine. Germany, Croatia and Austria are the EU countries with the greatest diversity of languages.
Ten states have not yet ratified the Charter, including Italy, Greece, Russia and Poland. But France is the European state with the most unfavourable minority language policies: it has never ratified the Charter because, according to its Minister of Culture, “it is against the principles of the state”. Article 2 of the French Constitution stipulates that “The language of the Republic is French”.
To mark the tenth anniversary, the Secretary General of the Council of Europe, Terry Davis, spoke up for regional and minority languages and not only defended their importance as part of our cultural heritage but also the fundamental right of speakers to use them “in private and public life.”
Davis also talked about the stereotypes often associated with these languages: “minorities are not an accident of history or an exotic and suspicious group of people, but an integral and essential part of Europe’s mosaic”. He added that “we must not only tolerate a minority, we must respect it. The extent to which the majority protects and promotes the rights of the minority is a measure of the level of democratic development in a particular country.”
Map: Aproximació a l'Europa de les Llengües (The Languages of Europe), designed by CIEMEN.
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