This year’s EDL initiative ‘How multilingual is your classroom/organisation?’ to discover Europe’s most multilingual classrooms and workplaces encouraged schools, offices, associations and organisations to showcase their language skills. Many photos, song records, videos, posters, poems in different languages were all sent in as evidence of language rich classrooms. A selection of just some of the entries has been compiled in a short video highlighting multilingual Europe in practice. All entrants to the initiative will shortly receive a certificate of participation.
The activity voted the most innovative EDL event this year was entitled “Doorway to the world”. The e-Twinning event coordinated by the Polish school “Szkoła Podstawowa nr 1 w Żarach” sought to bring schools together from all over Europe to celebrate the Day in an international way. The title proved very apt as the Day was celebrated in more countries than ever (51) all over the world, not only in Europe but also for the first time in countries such as India, Jordan, Uruguay and Cuba!
A competition to design a t-shirt for the 2019 European Day of Languages is still underway and will close on 31 December 2018.
In his statement on the occasion of the Day, the Secretary General of the Council of Europe, Thorbjørn Jagland, highlighted the importance of openness, “Understanding each other is the key to benefitting from Europe’s rich cultural diversity. Language education helps us to do this and to embrace other cultures and ways of life.” The Day received widespread press coverage in many countries, with articles about EDL featuring heavily in the media, such as El País, The Irish Times, ANSA.it, NTV and Euronews among many others.
The events taking place in celebration of the 2018 Day were organised mainly by schools, universities, language and cultural institutes, associations and also by the European Commission’s translation field offices which co-organised around 70 activities.
On a local level, the language festival in Graz coordinated by the Graz Language Network and taking place in the City museum, welcomed around 2,000 participants to a day of fun and, of course, educational activities, involving language challenges, singing, dancing, language taster courses, poetry slams and a wide variatey of games and competitions.
We would like to thank everyone who organised and/or participated in activities related to this year’s European Day of Languages. We have already received lots of ideas and suggestions for 2019 and are already looking forward to it!