Home > European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages
The European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages is a European convention (ETS 148) adopted in 1992 under the auspices of the Council of Europe to protect and promote historical regional and minority languages in Europe. It only applies to languages traditionally used by the nationals of the State Parties (thus excluding languages used by recent immigrants from other states), which significantly differ from the majority or official language (thus excluding mere local dialects of the official or majority language) and which either have a territorial basis (and are therefore traditionally spoken by populations of regions or areas within the State) or are used by linguistic minorities within the State as a whole (thereby including such languages as Yiddish and Romany, which were used over a wide geographic area).Languages which are official within regions or provinces or federal units within a State (for example Catalan in Spain) are not classified as official languages of the State and may therefore benefit from the Charter. On the other hand, the Republic of Ireland has not been able to sign the Charter on behalf of the Irish language (although a minority language) as it is defined as the first official language of the state. The United KingdomThe United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland is a state in Western Europe, usually known simply as the United Kingdom the UK Britain or less accurately as Great Britain . The UK was formed by a series of Acts of Union which united the formerly has, though, ratified the Charter in respect of (among other languages) IrishThe Irish language is a minority language in Northern Ireland, known in Irish as Tuaisceart Eireann or na se chontae (the six counties). Irish received official recognition in Northern Ireland for the first time under the Good Friday Agreement. A cross-bo in Northern IrelandNorthern Ireland is the smallest of the Home Nations of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Northern Ireland lies in the north-east of the island of Ireland. It covers 14,139 square kilometres (5,459 square miles), and has a populati. FranceThe French Republic or France ( French: Republique francaise or France is a country whose metropolitan territory is located in western Europe, and which is further made up of a collection of overseas islands and territories located in other continents., although a signatory, has been constitutionally blocked from ratifying the Charter in respect of the languages of FranceThere are a number of languages of France although the French language is the only official language of the country. However, several historical regional languages are still spoken, to some extent. Some of them are sometimes called patois but this term (r.
The charter provides a large number of different actions state parties can take to protect and promote historical regional and minority languages. There are two levels of protection - all signatories must apply the lower level of protection to qualifying languages; signatories may further declare that a qualifying language or languages will benefit from the higher level of protection which lists a range of actions from which states must agree to undertake at least thirty-five.
1 See also
- European languagesMost of the many indigenous languages of Europe belong to the Indo-European language family. The scope of this article also includes languages spoken outside of continental Europe that linguistically belong to European language families (such as Afrikaans
- Languages of the European UnionOfficial languages of the institutions The official languages of the institutions of the European Union are Czech Danish Dutch English Estonian Finnish French German Greek Hungarian Italian Latvian Lithuanian Maltese Polish Portuguese Slovak Slovene Spani
- Universal Declaration of Linguistic RightsThe Universal Declaration of Linguistic Rights is a document signed by Unesco, the PEN Clubs, and several non-governmental organizations in 1996 to support linguistic rights, especially those of endangered languages. See also Language policy Minority lang
