Quotes

"A different language is a different vision of life." - Federico Fellini, Italian film director

Learn languages

A matter of life or death? We never know... :)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GT86iWiH2mI

My background

I am Portuguese and french on my mother's side and I studied for 16 years in a french school in Lisbon. I speak Portuguese, French and English and a little bit of Sapnish and Italian. In order to exemplify today's reality I'm showing you my friends and their language backgrounds as well as my family. My purpose is not to generalize but rather to show you how european families are evolving nowadays.

(Even though we can't read what's written on the image, this is just an example of young people nowadays speaking an average of 3 to 4 languages. This shows how multilingualism is increasing in today's society.)

The evolution of language in Europe and the effects on family

In this presentation a talked about the evolution of languages in Europe and its effects on family and, as an example I presented my own background, my family and my friends.

The European Union (EU) is an economic and political union of 27 member states. The languages of the European Union are languages used by people within the member states of the European Union. They include the twenty-three official languages of the European Union along with a range of others. (FACT: The most widely spoken mother tongue in the EU is German, while more than 50% can understand English.

French is an official language common to the three cities that are political centres of the Union: Brussels (Belgium), Strasbourg (France) and Luxembourg city (Luxembourg), while Catalan, Galician and Russian are the most widely used non-recognized languages in the EU.)

The asserts that it is in favour of linguistic diversity and currently has a European Commissioner for Multilingualism, Leonard Orban.The Commissioner for Multilingualism was responsible for language policy of the European Union, i.e. promoting multilingualism for the citizens and the institutions of the EU. It was created on 1 January 2007 during the Barroso Commission. The only commissioner is Leonard Orban (2007–2010).The new portfolio was criticised for vagueness and ambiguity. Some claimed that it would be better to create a portfolio for the protection of ethnic minorities rather than promoting foreign languages learning.

Multilingualism is the act of using, or promoting the use of, multiple languages, either by an individual speaker or by a community of speakers. Multilingual speakers outnumber monolingual speakers in the world's population. The generic term for a multilingual person is polyglot. Multilingualism is becoming a social phenomenon governed by the needs of globalization and cultural openness. Thanks to the ease of access to information, facilitated by the internet, individuals' exposure to multiple languages is getting more and more frequent, and triggering therefore the need to acquire more and more languages.

This phenomenon is the result of the greater mobility of people and consequent cross-linguistic relationships and therefore, an increasing number of children are growing up with early exposures to two languages in the family.

Introduction

Hello everyone, welcome to my blog. My name is Constança Soromenho, and I would like to present you my ideas for a project for a children's book. The book would be a way of trying to introduce young children to concepts such as ecology and recycling as well encouraging them to explore and learn different languages. Even though the final idea isn't clear yet, this project is based on a little presentation I did for Niels Peter Flint's class (Micro Macro Monde). I talked about the evolution of lansuage in Europe and its effects on family and so, as an introduction to this theme, I'm going to summarize the presentation in the next post. This will help you understand, I hope, how something as learning new languages and ways of expressing yourself is related to sustainability, wich is normally associated to ecology and the capacity for biological systems to remain diverse and productive over time. I must say that although the link between the two may not be obvious, if we think about it, what is more important to preserve our planet than comunication and tolerance? By understanding languages, we understand cultures and therefore we are closer to that utopycal but ultimately imperative idea that we could live together in harmony.