Multilingualism is the ability to communicate and understand more than just a single language. These days and even in the past, being multilingual is very useful especially if you would want to communicate with more people from around the world.

Recently, the European Union and the country of India have signed a joint declaration to strengthen dialogue and cooperation on international dialogue and linguistic diversity. The minister of state for human resource development of India has stated that there is a need to send a clear message that all their languages are equally important, with EU and India having more than twenty official languages.

The minister also stated that India is essentially a multilingual country and that a part of their cultural heritage is their linguistic diversity which is also an essential facet to its nation-building philosophy. The joint declaration of the EU and India will help provide a challenge and opportunity for the education planners who want to consider societal multilingualism as an active resource shared among many interacting communities since Indian culture has always understood the importance of language studies.

The European Union commissioner who is in charge of multilingualism has said that the declaration rekindles their commitment for closer cooperation in the filed of multilingualism and that the promotion of language skills would allow them to engage in deeper exchanges. He has also stated that the declaration would allow India and the EU to learn from each other.

The EU-India declaration also aims to strengthen their cooperation on impact of languages on social cohesion, employability, new technologies for language learning and terminology, and lifelong language learning. The declaration is a follow-up to the EU-India Summit in France in 2008 where the leaders of both entities have committed themselves to developing a dialogue on the promotion of intercultural dialogue, languages, and multilingualism.

The very first step towards the dialogue of India and the EU was achieved in December 2008 with the conference in New Delhi called “Multilingualism and Cultural Dialogue in Globalization” which coincided with the 2008 European Year of Intercultural Dialogue. The said declaration of the involved parties would allow them mutual learning through conferences and seminars as well as building administrative links between the European Commission and the executive body of the European Union, the human resource development ministry of India, and other Indian authorities.

India has a population of more than a billion people and it is a country which represents a unique example of religious and socio-cultural variety which brings with it an abundance of languages. Based on the 2001 Census Report, more than a million native speakers speak twenty-nine languages, at least ten thousand speak one hundred twenty-two languages, and a smaller number of the population speak two hundred thirty-four languages. India also has twenty-two official languages besides English and Hindi. The rich linguistic diversity of India is similar with the linguistic landscape of Europe and it is a privileged country for being a partner of the EU in the field of multilingualism.

If the declaration of India and the EU to promote multilingualism will be successful, it would be interesting if other countries participate in similar programs and help promote multilingualism and the learning of languages throughout the world.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 16th, 2009 at 8:00 am and is filed under Language News, Languages and Medias. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.