Brussels, 12/03/2009 (Agence Europe) - Leonard Orban, the commissioner for multilingualism, and Indian Minister of State Daggubati Purandeshwari signed, on Friday 6 March, a joint declaration on multilingualism. The two parties hope to strengthen their cooperation in all language matters: linguistic diversity, intercultural dialogue, impact of languages on employability, business competitiveness, social cohesion, lifelong language learning, new technologies for language learning and terminology. “India's experience in coping with linguistic diversity is unique in the world and I believe that the EU and India can learn from each other in this area”, Mr Orban said. Alongside Hindi (the official language) and English (the commercial language), the country also has 22 official regional languages.
The joint declaration is a follow-up to the EU-India summit in Marseilles on 29 September 2008, where EU and Indian leaders pledged to develop a dialogue on the promotion of languages, intercultural dialogue and multilingualism. A first step towards this was taken in December 2008 with the conference on the theme “Multilingualism and Cultural Dialogue in Globalisation” held in New Delhi, India, in the context of the European Year of Intercultural Dialogue 2008. (I.L./transl.jl)