FUEN participates in the General Assembly of the Network to Promote Linguistic Diversity (NPLD)

FUEN advisor Frank de Boer attended the General Assembly of the Network to Promote Linguistic Diversity (NPLD), a partner organisation of FUEN. The General Assembly and the accompanying seminar titled “Media, Social Media and Information Technology: their influence on our languages”, took place from 26-27 May 2016 in Bilbao and was hosted by the Government of the Basque Autonomous Community

For several years NPLD has been a partner of FUEN, with both European organisations joining efforts in our common goal, i.e. promoting the minority languages. At the NPLD General Assembly, Frank de Boer delivered the message from FUEN and its newly elected president Loránt Vincze, that FUEN strongly supports the European Roadmap for Linguistic Diversity that was developed by NPLD. In his letter, President Vincze called for the support of NPLD for the idea launched by FUEN to create a Minority Dialogue Forum, based on the Citizens’ Committee of the Minority SafePack Initiative of FUEN. President Loránt Vincze: “ The Minority Dialogue Forum intends to gather minority NGOs, European regions and representatives from the majority to be able to better promote our agendas. It is a project FUEN intend to realize, and I count on your support and participation”.

The seminar part of the meeting focused on media and social media in minority languages. According to Ms Cristina Uriarte, Minister for Culture and Language Policy in the Basque Country, “Linguistic diversity is an added value and all levels of institutions, from the European, State, regional and local level, must ensure that it is actively promoted”.

The Chair of NPLD, Vice Minister for Language Policy Patxi Baztarrika, gave an overview of the vitality and presence of Basque in the social media. With 245,841 articles on Wikipedia (31^st place of all languages), a 33^rd place on Twitter and a wide presence on Facebook, Google and other web-services. NPLD-Chair Baztarrika: “It is important for languages to be present in the world of media and ICT – the speakers are living in this digital world and must be able to use their language”. Basque is doing well. However, this success is based on a very deliberate investment policy in the Basque language, as Professor Maite Goñi explained.

Professor Maite Goñi was part of a committee developing a roadmap on the best strategy to invest in the Basque language by choosing priority areas. Her committee came up with a list of 60 possible actions, and selected the most pressing ones, including promoting Wikipedia in Basque, offering grants for developing new content, working on common licencing for Basque content, developing analytic tools, working on video games and educational content, developing Basque apps and CMS, offering help to existing Basque-language internet communities, sharing the language content owned by the government and supporting the development of language technologies for mobile phones, speech recognition and machine translation.

In the afternoon an excursion took place to the region of Navarre and its capital Pamplona. The members of NPLD were welcomed by the President of Navarre, Ms Uxue Barkos, who told about the linguistic situation in her region and the language policy of the regional government.

More information
Network to Promote Linguistic Diversity (NPLD)
The European Roadmap for Linguistic Diversity by NPLD