Everything about the European Charter For Regional Or Minority Languages totally explained
The
European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages (
ECRML) is a European
treaty (CETS 148) adopted in 1992 under the auspices of the
Council of Europe to protect and promote historical
regional and
minority languages in
Europe. It only applies to
languages traditionally used by the nationals of the State Parties (thus excluding languages used by recent
immigrants from other states), which significantly differ from the majority or
official language (thus excluding what the state party wishes to consider as mere local dialects of the official or majority language) and which either have a territorial basis (and are therefore traditionally spoken by populations of regions or areas within the State) or are used by linguistic minorities within the State as a whole (thereby including such languages as
Yiddish and
Romani, which are used over a wide geographic area).
Languages which are official within regions or provinces or federal units within a State (for example
Catalan in
Spain) are not classified as official languages of the State and may therefore benefit from the Charter. On the other hand, the
Republic of Ireland hasn't been able to sign the Charter on behalf of the
Irish language (although a minority language) as it's defined as the first official language of the state. The
United Kingdom has, though, ratified the Charter in respect of (among other languages)
Irish in
Northern Ireland.
France, although a signatory, has been constitutionally blocked from ratifying the Charter in respect of the
languages of France.
The charter provides a large number of different actions state parties can take to protect and promote historical regional and minority languages. There are two levels of protection—all signatories must apply the lower level of protection to qualifying languages; signatories may further declare that a qualifying language or languages will benefit from the higher level of protection which lists a range of actions from which states must agree to undertake at least 35.
Languages protected under the Charter
The countries which have ratified the Charter and the languages for which the ratification was made are the following:
Notes and references
Further Information
Get more info on 'European Charter For Regional Or Minority Languages'.
|
External Link Exchanges
Do you know how hard it is to get a link from a large encyclopaedia? Well we're different and will prove it. To get a link from us just add the following HTML to your site on a relevant page:
<a href="http://european_charter_for_regional_or_minority_languages.totallyexplained.com">European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages Totally Explained</a>
Then simply click through this link from your web page. Our crawlers will verify your link, extract the title of your web page and instantly add a link back to it. If you like you can remove the words Totally Explained and embed the link in article text.
As long as your link remains in place, we'll keep our link to you right here. Please play fair - our crawlers are watching. Your site must be closely related to this one's topic. Any kind of spamming, dubious practises or removing the link will result in your link from us being dropped and, potentially, your whole site being banned. |
