The European Day of Languages, celebrated each year on 26 September, provides an opportunity to raise awareness of all the languages represented in today’s Europe and highlight their similarities, their differences as well as some of their quirks. Most of all, however, it is a celebration of Europe’s unique linguistic context and an impetus for people of all ages and walks of life to also learn to communicate (and be understood!) in a language in addition to their own. In and around the Day hundreds of events (1,400 in 2017) will take place all over Europe and indeed around the world, often dealing with very different topics and audiences but with the same inherent premise – to encourage language learning.

Over the coming months, you will be able to find out which events are taking place near you and/or post details of your own activity via the EDL calendar of activities. The European Day of Languages’ website also contains a wealth of creative ideas, interesting facts, materials to download, game and activities. We will also be running a series of competitions and attempting to find ‘Europe’s most multilingual classroom’! We hope to count on the same enthusiasm as last year’s record breaking initiative where we received around 2800 videos on “Why do you love a (particular) language?”. To add some extra spice 2018 marks the European Year of Cultural Heritage.

All in all, it promises to be a busy and exciting build up to this year’s European Day of Languages … More details on all of the above will follow at: http://edl.ecml.at.