Language rich Europe: multilingualism policies implementation in the European Union

Abstract

This article presents a research carried out in the framework of the Language Rich Europe project. Language Rich Europe (LRE) is co-funded by the European Union and its main aim is to perform a comparative analysis of countries’ performance against the European multilingualism policy for an overview of the situation of national and minorities’ languages in European countries and to illustrate policies and good practices initiated for the promotion of multilingualism. The research has been carried our in 14 countries members of the European Union and 2 regions in Europe based on a methodology that will be presented below together with the results at the level of Romania. The research results mainly show that at European level a lot of measures have been taken for ensuring social inclusion and integration through support offered by policies in the field of multilingualism and minorities languages. There are still areas where improvement is needed, with the primary and secondary education being the fields where reactions have been most prompt and adaptation swift in adopting the key European recommendations for multi/plurilingualism. In Romania, the areas needing improvement are support for minority languages while at the level of legislation results show that recommendations for multi/plurilingualism have been implemented in key areas such as foreign language education at primary level (the current law of education enabling competition between schools by allowing them to have a differentiated offer of foreign languages.