Landerren Txokoa

“We have more cars because we want freedom of movement and as our economy is strong, we buy cars”. The director of the Danish Road Directoratet —the organization to manage the national roads—, Sven Krarup Nielsen, used these words to explain the fact that Denmark has twice as many cars it had 35 years ago. The increasing of private cars is a phenomenon we are used to see in almost all the countries. But that often mean more traffic accidents. In order to prevent this, during more than 30 years the Danish government has made different restrictive laws and the number of killed is going down every year.

Etiquetas: safety, roads, Denmark

While some MEPs are trying to cut the number of official languages in EU, others are fighting to officialice their languages and have the same linguistic rights as others do. By Lander Arbelaitz (Brussels)

Despite the fact that twenty languages, soon to be 21, are official in the European Union (EU), not all the Members of the European Parliament (MEP) can speak in their mother toungue. Their languages are known as minority or regional languages and they are not official in the EU. Nowadays there are at least 15 MEPs in this situation. Joan i Mari Bernat is one of them. He is Catalonian but, he has to speak in either English, German, French or Spanish in the Parliament. This is despite the fact that Catalonian is spoken by ten million people. He thinks the subject of minority languages is a problem concerning the European Union, and that the EU should do something. He is leading a report on multilingualism in the European Parliament and proposes specific actions. On 9th October this report will be re-discussed at the European Parliament to go to plenary session later on.

According to Davyth A. Hicks, expert in minority languages and the editor in chief of Eurolang –Europe’s biggest news agency informing people about minority languages–, up to 50 million people in the EU speak a minority language. “Ten per cent of the population’s native language is not official in EU and if we put all of them together, they are like a big country”. According to UNESCO, in Europe there are 156 languages and in the report, Red Book on Endangered Languages: Europe, by Tapani Salminen

Etiquetas: european, minority, minoritary, languages, Davith, Hicks, Johan, Häggman, Eva, Bidania