EU Language Priority
Throughout all history of the EU, multilingualism has always been a hot issue of its internal debates due to its multilingual structure of population. However, right after the Establishment of the Single Market in 1993, multilingualism has become a social factor of crucial importance.
Since that moment, the European Council of Ministers set a challenging topic of "every child learning his mother tongue and two foreign languages". In its turn, it led to the further promotion of scarcely-known European languages throughout all European territory.
It was unanimously resolved to declare 2001 the European Year of Languages and start teaching foreign languages from primary school up to the old age. 2010 was defined a certain "checking point" in this respect as it was declared the date by which all the children within the EU were to be involved in foreign language mastering process.
2008 was declared the European Year of Intercultural Dialogue promoting the idea of multilingualism and languages "as an instrument of advancing peace and mutual cooperation within specified region".
Conformably, the EU elaborated three fundamentals of own multilingualism policy:
- contributing to linguistic divergence within society
- advancing stable multilingual economy
- advancing social involvement in the multilingual context.
