In praise of multilingualism		Shuara	India	Users are choosers

Defenders of diversity

© Philippe Franchini, Paris

Movements supporting linguistic diversity are building up the pressure for an international agreement on language rights Linguapax UNESCO Languages Division, 7 place de Fontenoy, 75352 Paris, France. Fax: 33 (0) 1 4568-5622/5627 e-mail: am.majlof@unesco.org   unesco.cat@cc.uab.es UNESCO’s work in the field of languages began to take off in the mid-1980s. A key step was the launch of the Linguapax project in 1986. This was designed “to associate the teaching of languages with the promotion of international understanding and peace,” says Félix Marti, head of UNESCO’s Advisory Committee for Linguistic Pluralism and Multilingual Education, which was set up in 1998. In the last 15 years, Linguapax has provided technical back-up for a number of national and regional projects, including the rebuilding of Cambodia’s educational system around the Khmer language. This involved producing two million school textbooks in Khmer and training a team of Cambodian teachers and editors. Linguapax has also set up an inter-university network co-ordinated by the University of Mons (Belgium) to promote the project and its methods, and is working on a report on the world’s languages (see below). Protecting linguistic diversity and encouraging multilingual education are two closely-related goals. To promote the former, Linguapax has put together guides and manuals for teachers and policy-makers in countries, especially in Africa, that want to incorporate local languages into their education system. A new project, called Pericles, will promote the learning of neighbouring languages by encouraging young people from adjacent countries to work together to preserve shared natural and cultural heritage sites. A project currently at an experimental stage in the border region where Luxemburg, France and Germany meet is designed to be applied internationally wherever there is a desire to boost regional co-operation or in areas recovering from wars. There is international awareness about the need to protect the non-tangible heritage of humanity such as languages but there is no legal instrument to back it up. “Unfortunately there’s no international agreement referring specifically to linguistic rights,” says Marti. “It’s a very sensitive subject, but it is up to UNESCO to draft an international instrument to protect them which could be adopted by most countries.” Report on the World’s Languages “What is the name of your language? Is it used in written form? Where is it spoken? What are its geographical frontiers?” These and many other questions feature in a UNESCO world language survey begun in 1997. The answers to them, along with input from research institutes, specialists and bibliographical sources, will go into the first edition of a UNESCO Report on the World’s Languages, to be published in 2001. The report will provide a new working tool to help protect the linguistic heritage of humanity. It will comprise relevant and objective information about the status, use and evolution of the world’s languages. As well as filling an information gap, the report has the more ambitious goal of proposing solutions and possible action to further the rescue and development of languages in danger of dying out. The first International Mother Language Day http://webworld.unesco.org/imld At the suggestion of UNESCO member states, the Organization’s General Conference in November 1999 proclaimed an International Mother Language Day, which was marked for the first time on 21 February 2000 by a ceremony at UNESCO Headquarters in Paris. NGOs for linguistic pluralism The defence of languages, their variety and pluralism is winning increasingly wide international support, especially through the work of non-governmental organizations. Below, a sample of activities in this field. Terralingua P.O.Box 122, Hancock, Michigan 49930-0122, United States http://cougar.ucdavis.edu/nas/terralin/ Terralingua, a nongovernmental organization set up in 1996, believes that preservation of the physical and the intangible heritage of humanity are two sides of the same coin, because their fates are intertwined and they are threatened by the same socio-economic factors. Everything that is done to protect the lands, languages and cultures of indigenous peoples is vital for safeguarding the planet’s diversity, because although these people comprise only five per cent of the world’s population they speak 57 per cent of its languages and inhabit regions where biological diversity is greatest. The Terralingua website, which has a wealth of information and links to other organizations with the same goals, is open to all kinds of contributions, from proverbs and poems in any language to money donations to the Endangered Language Fund, whose watchword is “When a language is gone, it is gone forever”. Linguasphere Observatory www.linguasphere.org Linguasphere Observatory is an independent, non-profit transnational research body which published in February 2000 the first edition of the Register of the World’s Languages and Speech Communities. The first-ever detailed catalogue of the world’s languages and dialects, the Register provides a global linguistic panorama at the dawn of the 21st century. SIL International www.sil.org The Summer Institute of Linguistics, based in Dallas, Texas, has been studying, promoting and recording the world’s least-known languages, especially those which have no system of writing, for more than half a century. FIPLV www.cet.univ-paris5.fr/fiplv2000/prof.html The International Federation of Teachers of Living Languages, founded in 1931 in Paris, is an NGO recognized by UNESCO and the Council of Europe. It encourages the teaching and learning of living languages to facilitate communication, understanding, co-operation and friendship between all the world’s peoples. Language rights www.linguistic-declaration.org The Follow-up Committee for a Universal Declaration of Linguistic Rights champions the principle of equal rights for all language communities. It calls for the adoption of a universal declaration of linguistic rights, including the right to be taught and to communicate with official bodies in the language of one’s community. Surfing on a sea of languages A mass of information about languages can be found on the Internet, which is increasingly used as a working tool by students, translators and teachers. They can find sites from which they can download for free the characters of currently used alphabets, such as Cyrillic, Mandarin or Hebrew, alphabets that have died out, such as Egyptian hieroglyphics, and even invented languages such as that created by J.R.R. Tolkien, author of the epic trilogy The Lord of the Rings, not to mention sites offering exercises in English or Spanish. Surfers can also access the terminology database of the European Union’s translation service. Titled Eurodicautom, it is a kind of super-dictionary with more than 5.5 million entries in 12 European languages. But in the battle for multilingualism, the Internet is a double-edged sword, since most of its contents are only in English. The 1999-2000 edition of UNESCO’s World Communication and Information Report quotes from surveys done by the Internet Society and by Euromarketing to the effect that 58% of Internet users are English-speakers. After them, far behind, come those who speak Spanish (8.7%), German (8.6%), Japanese (7.9%) and French (3.7%). In terms of the number of web pages, the domination of English is even greater—at 81%, followed by German (4%), Japanese, French and the Scandinavian languages (2% each) and Spanish (1%). The world’s other languages account for barely 8% of the Net’s web pages. Eurodicautom: http://eurodic.ip.lu/cgi-bin/edicbin/EuroDicWWW.pl Lessons and exercises in Spanish Cervantes Virtual Centre: http://cvc.cervantes.es/.