European Language Equality Network

On November 5^th 2016, the European Language Equality Network (ELEN) celebrated its General assembly in the City of Barcelona, Spain. This was a good opportunity to talk about European Multiculturalism and the use of minority languages.

According to the page https://elen.ngo/information/ , ELEN is a NGO established in 2011 dedicated to the promotion and protection of European lesser used Languages. ELEN works toward linguistic equality for those languages, most of them belonging to minorities. It is important to highlight that an important group of those languages are considered as endangered languages by UNESCO. ELEN has its main address in Carhaix (Karaez) Bretagne, in France, a commune where part of its population is bilingual French – Breton.

High officers of the government of Catalonia (Generalitat de Catalunya) including its president, Carles Puigdemont, welcome participants of this Assembly. The General Assembly of ELEN was celebrated in the “Camp Nou”, the Home Stadium of FC Barcelona. Few people know that this year, this very important team in European football is celebrating 100 years that they adopted Catalan as their official language.

Among the topics that were discussed during this event, Secretary General of ELEN, Davyth Hicks talked about the recommendations of ELEN to the EU to promote and protect all the languages. Davyth Hicks is also director of Eurolang, also an NGO that works for promotion and protection of the European lesser used languages. He has written several reports for European commission about languages and he can speak Cornish.

Other topics included: European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages (ECRML), its mechanism and problems to implement them; Bringing discrimination cases to the EU Court of Human Rights; Brexit impact on Celtic Languages; Situation and current initiatives for Galego Language (Galician); The Estonian Bureau for Lesser Used Languages presented a report about the situation of languages like Udmurt, Erzya, Mari and Tatar, all of them spoken in Russia and with exception of Tatar, all of them are Ural languages like Finnish and Estonian. 

ELEN Vice-President Prof. Ferran Suay was elected as new ELEN President. Prof. Suay is Professor in the University of Valencia in the department of Psychobiology. He can speak Catalan, Spanish, English and French. Prof Suay will replace Prof. Jean-Marie Woehrling, judge by profession and who is one of the authors of the European Charter for regional and minority languages.            

In my opinion, ELEN will face now new challenges regarding linguistic discrimination. When we take a look on the organizations that support ELEN, we can see that there are some who work with minority languages such as Welsh, Cornish, Breton, Euskera (Basque) or Aromanian (Macedo-Romanian), languages whose speakers are located in countries where they may face specific hardships. There are also organizations that work for linguistics rights in hot bilingual zones such as the French region of Alsace and the Hungarian speaking areas of Slovakia. Although European eyes are watching what happen in the UK after the BREXIT and the fate of its Celtic languages, as well as the increasing cases of language discrimination toward EU citizens who live in that country, not always language discrimination happens practiced by people who speak an official language toward those who speak a minority language: It can happen in the other way too. We do not need to go far from this article. According to newspapers like ABC and El Mundo, two of the largest newspapers in Spain, The “Generalitat de Catalunya” has been denounced several times for discrimination against those who speak Spanish and not Catalan. In this link, an article written in the Economist http://www.economist.com/news/europe/21698819-secessionist-catalonia-cracking-down-businesses-communicate-only-spanish talks about the famous linguistic fines that Generalitat is imposing to private business who do not use Catalan language when they print information for public use, whether it is an advertisement, catalogue or even a menu in a restaurant.

In other hand, it would be great to see published any conclusions from the Assembly in the internet. To write this article and to learn about the program of the event, I had to follow the tweets and re-tweets by Eurolang, some of them in diverse languages such as Catalan, Galician, Euskera and Welsh. There were pieces of information in English, but still most of the reports are in Catalan. The same info section of the web page of ELEN writes that aprox. 10% of the population of the EU speak a minority language. I think that the work of ELEN needs to be known by more people inside and outside the EU. ELEN will have more impact using languages like English, French, Spanish, German and Russian. More can be done if the largest languages in number of speakers share the same space with the lesser used ones.

To read tweets in different minority languages is good and show that speakers of regional languages are willing to integrate technology in their everyday lives, keeping their languages alive and very well connected to the rest of the world.