April 2006

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THE COMMITTEE OF MINISTERS RECOMMENDS GERMANY TO IMPROVE EDUCATION IN MINORITY LANGUAGES

April 2006 – The Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe recently issued the recommendations on the application of the European Charter for Regional and Minority Languages by Germany after analysing the Committee of Experts’ report. Germany ratified the ECRML in September 1998 and the current report belongs to the second monitoring cycle.

The report submitted by the experts state that the situation of regional or minority languages has not changed significantly since the first monitoring round and that the previous recommendations still remain valid. The Committee of Experts welcomes the adoption of the Frisian Law adopted by the Parliament of Schleswig-Holstein in 2004 and considers that similar measures are also needed in other länder concerned.

Besides, it regards as insufficient the efforts made by the German authorities to design planning and monitoring mechanisms for the development of regional or minority language education, and recommends to take urgent action to strengthen schooling in North Frisian, Sater Frisian and Lower Sorbian. It also reminds the German authorities that the shortage of adequately trained teachers at all levels of education remains one of the principal problems. As regards Lower German, the experts declare that it continues to be treated as a variant of German and therefore finds it difficult to find a place in the curricula as a subject in its own right. The use of Sorbian, Frison, Danish and Low German before administrative authorities remains marginal and largely absent from the private media. Furthermore it points out that more determined measures are needed to encourage the use of those languages in economic and social life.

As positive measures, the Committee deems valuable the steps taken to extend Part III protection to the Romany language, although expresses its concerns about the feasibility of some implementations since it has no standard written form and some Romany-speakers do not wish their language to have a presence outside their community.