European Bureau for Lesser Used Languages: Press Release

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Date: Tue, 11 Dec 2001 16:04:50 +0200 (EET)
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Subject: European Bureau for Lesser Used Languages: Press Release

From: MINELRES moderator <[email protected]>

Original sender: Bertrand Romain Menciassi <[email protected]>

European Bureau for Lesser Used Languages: Press Release



Brussels, Friday, December 10, 2001

"The European languages that few people speak about."
More than forty minority languages of the European Union are presented
on the new "web of words" site

Did you know that Russian is one of the minority languages of the
European Union? That Cornish, a Celtic language, which disappeared in
the 19th century, is reviving in Cornwall and on the web? That
Judeo-Spanish, today spoken by numerous European Jews, is very similar
to the Spanish spoken in the 15th century? The "Web-Of-Words" - site
[http://www.eblul.org/wow] presents about forty languages, so called
"regional- or minority languages", which are spoken in the European
Union.

"It is one of the goals of the European Bureau for Lesser Used
Languages, to call the attention of every European citizen on the
diversity and richness of all the languages spoken in the European
Union" explains Markus Warasin, the Bureau�s Secretary General " this
web site has been voluntarily created to answer questions asked by the
public about the European language reality, often very different from
one Member-State to another."

The site describes in a simple way the situation of each minority
language of the European Union, its status, its history and the
reality of its use. But "a language is also about its sound and its
accents. Therefore, it seemed extremely important to us, to complete
the presentation, by adding poems read by native speakers." says Julia
Turkina, in charge of the documentation for "Web-Of-Words".

Created within the framework of the European Year of Languages with
the financial support of the European Commission (DG Education and
Culture), the web site of Web-of-Words will be further developed and
enriched: an original and multilingual screen saver is already
downloadable from the site; a quiz will soon be online, with numerous
books to win; further useful linguistic explanations; more poems and
photos will be online before the end of the European Year of Languages
2001.

WEB-OF-WORDS
A web site dedicated to the linguistic diversity of the European Union
http://eblul.org/wow

Contact :
Bertrand-Romain Menciassi � Project leader
European Bureau for Lesser Used Languages
Rue Saint-Josse, 49
B-1210 Bruxelles
T�l : +32 (0)2 250 31 62
Fax : +32 (0)2 218 19 74
Email : [email protected]

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