ADUM

Working together to promote
regional and minority languages in Europe

The ADUM project (which in Friulian, a language spoken in north-eastern Italy, means “together”) aims to offer people and organisations throughout Europe that work on behalf of regional and minority languages information on the European programmes that can be taken advantage of (co-)fund projects to promote these languages. Likewise, ADUM will offer a virtual learning space to assist with the drafting of European proposals by bodies and people working for over 60 linguistic communities in Europe.

The ADUM website will be available in English, French and German, and will provide access to a database of potential European partners and consultants, along with a useful list of research documents available on the Internet. Visitors to the site will be invited to join the list of potential partners and consultants, and will also find detailed advice in the form of:

- A manual on how to design a project proposal.
- Information on the potential usefulness of various EU programmes and actions.
- A set of case studies, so that they get to know what kinds of problems they may come across, and the solutions that others have found, when designing proposals for European projects.
- An interactive forum which will offer visitors the chance to work together to this end.

Dissemination of the project, alongside demonstrations of the virtual resources that have been developed, will be carried out by the partners through participation at various congresses and seminars.

The partners of this project are:
- UOC (Universitat Oberta de Catalunya. http://www.uoc.edu);
- the Research Centre on Multilingualism (Katholieke Universiteit Brussel, http://www.kubrussel.ac.be/ovm);
- the Centre for European Research of Wales;
- Slovenia's Institut za Narodnostna Vprasanja (http://www.inv.si);
- the Centro Internazionale sul Plurilinguismo (Università degli Studi di Udine, Italy, http://www.uniud.it/cip/);
- the independent consultant Dónall Ó'Riagáin from Ireland.

This initiative, co-ordinated by UOC, is part of the macro-project on cultural diversity in Europe led by the Europa Diversa (http://www.europadiversa.org) network.