Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2006-04-27-Speech-4-049"
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"en.20060427.3.4-049"2
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"Mr President, Commissioner, I too would like to extend warm thanks to the rapporteur, Mr Mavrommatis, for his dedication.
How well do young Europeans know foreign languages? Which languages are most spoken? Is multilingualism on the increase? That is what a Language Indicator is intended, in future, to find out, but considerations of efficiency and lack of funding mean that this Language Indicator is going to examine only five selected foreign languages, those being the ones that are allegedly the most widely taught within the EU. If they are going to get good marks, fifteen-year olds in every Member State will have to have knowledge of English, French, German, Spanish or Italian.
Quite apart from the fact that other statistics, for example the latest Eurobarometer, show that the fifth place is held by Russian rather than Italian, I think this language policy will have the fatal consequence of making English, French, German, Spanish and Italian the languages that schools will be more likely to offer in future, for no country wants to risk the stigma of being shown by the Language Indicator – any more than by the Pisa study – as bringing up the rear where language skills are concerned.
Even now, many students are more likely to want to take part in exchange programmes in France, Italy and Spain rather than in – for example – Prague, Warsaw or Budapest. Is that really what we want? Ought we not to have a rethink and promote a policy that encourages us to learn the languages of countries bordering on our own, not only for the sake of better communication, but also with business considerations in mind? Even today, an Austrian has far better chances in the labour market if he speaks an Eastern European language, no matter which one, yet, as a consequence of a misguided education policy, this skill has hitherto not been encouraged in my country’s schools.
Nor does the language indicator provide any kind of incentive for an early change in this policy, and ‘later’ may well mean ‘too late’. We live in a very fast-moving world. What matters is not the number of people in Europe who speak one language or another, but the social and economic relations between states. I would even go further and say that, if we think not only in a European way, but also globally, it will be a very good thing if our children and grandchildren are open to all the languages of the world.
The fact is that we are now living in a global village, and that is no longer something that is capable of being changed. It is a village in which the people who get what they want will be the ones who can make themselves understood. It is counter-productive for a language indicator not to be sensitive to these future needs or flexible enough to address them, and so I again urge you all, today, to support the amendments tabled by the Group of the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe."@en1
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