Growing awareness of being a European citizen through the plurilinguism

1. Growing awareness of being a European citizen through the plurilinguism

2. The plurilinguism The term plurilinguismrefers to the ability of the inhabitants of a geographical area to express themselves in different languages.

3. The plurilinguism in the UE The EU encourages its citizens to be able to speak other languages than the mother tongue. But it does not have much authority in this area because each Member State is responsible for training programs.

4. The languages in UE Currently the official languages of the 'European Union are 23 representing 27 states.

5. The origin of the languages Europeans speak many different languages and most of these have an ancient origin and belong to a single large language family, Indo-European.Most European languages derive from Latin and are called "Romanic” languages.In Europe there are other important linguistic families:- German- Slavic- Baltic- Celtic.Not all European languages come from these four large groups such as the Ural-Altaic and Caucasian and Atlantic ones .

6. The projects which support plurilinguism The Erasmus program was founded in 1987 through the work of the European Community. Studentswho join the ErasmusProgrammestudy or do aninternshipfor a periodof at least 3 monthswithinanacademicyear in anotherEuropeancountry. The Programmeguaranteesthat the periodspentabroadisrecognisedbytheiruniversity. The name of the program derives from Dutch humanist and theologian Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam: for several years he traveled throughout Europe in order to understand the different cultures.

7. The Comenius program is a European program, part of the Lifelong Learning Program, together with the Leonardo da Vinci program, the Erasmus program.Comenius actions arise as a support program to encourage the development and education, to help young people and educational staff better understand the European cultures, different languages and values.Comenius promotes the development of knowledge and understanding of the value of cultural and linguistic diversity in Europe.

8. The Leonardo da Vinci program is funded by the European Commission that aims to support European life-long training programs. The program aims to support European citizens in the acquisition of new skills, knowledge and qualifications that are recognized in all Member States of the European Union. It also encourages innovation and improvement both of professional and educational methods and training practice.

9. The Council of Europe and the European Commission for Multilingualism Asymbol of the Yin-Yang could represent the complementary actions of the Council of Europe and the European Commission of 25 in favor of the development of plurilinguism in Europe.Through the various different tools available to everyone, both the Council of Europe and the European Commission demonstrate a common interest in ensuring the increase of the linguistic heritage in Europe.

10. Beingplurilingual: why? Plurilinguismis the ability to use the language for communicative purposes and to participate in cross-cultural interaction, providing various types of competence in several languages and having experience of different cultures.The plurilingualcompetence is the basis for the participation of the citizens in social and political life of the community they belong to.Plurilinguism facilitates a greater understanding of repertoires of other citizens and the respect of their rights. Moreover it is a key element in the promotion of a "positive culture of antiracism" and “peace education”.

11. OUR EXPERIENCES

12. What about Dutch? Dutch is a language that belongs to the Group of West Germanic languages. The writte Dutch can be quite understandable by speakers of other Germanic languages, but the spoken language is very different and not very easy. The Dutch language is completely different from the Italian one because they belong to two different linguistic families. In our host families we have had the luck of speaking English, otherwise our adventure would have been very difficult and we would have had hard times to communicate with our families.

13. First of all we have to say that Dutch is really strange and definitely different from Italian but we like it. In our opinion it sounds like German and English mixed together and it has a strong pronunciation. We laughed the first time that we’ve heard people speaking in Dutch but after a week in The Netherlands it started to sound familiar. We think it is very difficult to learn Dutch: during the week we learned some words but we could not understand anything.

14. What about Spain? Spanish or Castilian, is a language of Romance origin belonging to the group of Indo-European languages, the most spoken in the world.From complex grammar, similar to the Italian one, and from the large lexical variety, the Spanish language may sound very simple to the ear of the Italians.Learning Spanish is becoming more and more popular and more and more students want to learn it, from middle and high school to college. In our school we are going to study Spanish next year too.

15. When we participated in Comenius in Spain we were expecting to speak English but host families could not speak English very well so we tried to understand and to speak Spanish. Actually it was not very difficult partly because Italian and Spanish belong to the some romance group. On the contrary the Spanish families could hardly understand Italian. We were able to learn some basic words and construct simple sentences to communicate effectively with the guys there.

16. In our opinion, the Spanish language is really nice, it is easy both to understand and to speak because it has many words which are similar to Italian. Thanks to this experience, we have brought with us a new language that we hope to never forget.