Miranda do Douro hosts meeting to revitalize European minority languages

-PUB-

Speaking to the Lusa agency, the president of the Associação de Língua e Cultura Mirandesa (ALCM), Alfredo Cameirão, said that this meeting will allow European experts linked to the teaching, preservation and dissemination of languages ​​to be brought to Miranda do Douro, in the district of Bragança. minority.

This EU initiative is a consortium that included several partners, including teachers of Southern Saami in Norway, Latgalian in Latvia, West Frisian in the Netherlands, Mirandese in Portugal, or Asturian-Leonese in Spain.

“One of the main objectives is to share experiences and learn from these European experts how to deal with minority languages ​​that are increasingly important in the European context”, he stressed.

OWL+ is an Erasmus+ project that creates pathways for educators to integrate under-resourced endangered languages ​​into their teaching activities.

This is a group of five organizations, in five different countries, that work together on ways to use languages ​​with few resources in educational environments, such as the Mirandese language.

Gema Zamora, a Spanish specialist in minority languages, said that it is necessary to understand the experience that people from Mirandese have in promoting and disseminating their language, which could be an incentive for other European countries with minority languages.

“The Mirandese community has a lot of energy and enthusiasm in preserving their language and maintains an important network and contacts in the Iberian Peninsula for its dissemination, a lot of dialogue with Spanish regions such as Extremadura, Galicia or Asturias”, highlighted the researcher.

According to this consortium, “in many contexts, the teaching of minority languages ​​lacks resources and/or visibility”.

“Teachers and educators who choose this career are taking ownership of this specific issue in their communities and, therefore, are proactive in developing and valuing their work”, reads the official page of this European organization.

The final objective of the project is to create tools that aim to raise educators’ awareness of low-resource languages, provide them with adequate information about these languages ​​and encourage their integration into different learning contexts.

The Mirandese language subject is taught at the Miranda do Douro School Group in all school cycles and years and in the current academic year 78% of all enrolled students attend the subject.

Portugal signed the European Charter for Regional and Minority Languages ​​in 2021.

Mirandese became the second official language in Portugal 25 years ago, after the approval of the law in the Assembly of the Republic, on September 17, 1998, which granted this status to the language spoken in the Northeast of Trás-os-Montes.