Donostia 2016 European Capital of Culture: one step beyond for language diversity

  • The Summit on European Language Diversity is a project to be developed jointly by the Donostia/San Sebastián 2016 European Cultural Capital Foundation and Euskararen Gizarte Eragileen Kontseilua (the Council of Social Entities for the Basque Language, also known as “Kontseilua”).


2015eko martxoaren 31n - 06:01

This project will be the start of a process undertaken by social entities, organizations and specialists to establish a protocol to ensure linguistic equality and present the conclusions to an international summit meeting.

The protocol will be the fruit of a series of discussions over preceding years by numerous work groups; an instrument bringing together scientific perspectives, academic opinions and social viewpoints; and a novel foundation for building a new Europe based on equality between language communities.

Therefore, it will be taken to international fora and institutions to allow entities of all kinds to use it to regulate their commitment to language diversity.

Barcelona 1996-Donostia 2016

The Universal Declaration of Language Rights (Barcelona, 1996) represented a historical product of the empowerment of civil society, for it was brought about by civil society’s determination to raise the question of the rights of languages.

This project’s aim is to reassert the same principles, creating an instrument emerging from the consensus of groups and organizations that speak for millions of European citizens. Thus the objective is to produce a means of developing the premises and spirit of the Universal Declaration of Language Rights in order to achieve true equality between all language communities, and for the process to culminate in a document in favour of peaceful coexistence.

A milestone for the support of language diversity

The Summit on European Language Diversity will last two days and will take place in December, 2016 in Donostia. At the summit, the process will be brought to a conclusion and the protocol that has been agreed upon will be presented.

The participants in the summit will include individuals and entities that have taken part in the work throughout the process together with a list of proposed signatories to the Protocol. The signatories will include entities and individuals acknowledged for their leading role in the language field.

After 2016, the structure created by the process for the duration of the project will give way to a single Monitoring Committee, whose job will consist of making sure the document is ratified internationally and reaches places where it can perform a regulatory function regarding language-related practices.


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