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Kinga Gál was keynote speaker on the MELT Conference

Kinga Gál was keynote speaker on the MELT Conference

2011. 10. 06.

MELT provides practical help concerning pre-school education to children living in national minority communities; therefore, it could also support the Hungarians living in the Carpathian Basin in mother tongue education. The MEP ofFidesz emphasized that "we need to raise awareness to the practical achievements both within minority societies and within the members of the majority societies."

The goal of this two-year project, financed by the European Union, was to collect useful experiences that could help the education of the pre-school children living in bilingual, primarily in minority and majority tongued communities. Altogether, four Western European minority communities participated in the program: the Swedish speaking community of Finland, the Frisians from the Netherlands, moreover, the Breton community from France and Wales from the UK. The Friesian community operates several trilingual schools, teaching courses in English beside to the Friesian and Dutch.

Another important objective of the program, emphasized by Kinga Gál, that it provides written booklets to parents, which presents to them the advantages of the mother tongue education. According to the program, parents have a key role in national minority mother tongue education since they are the one who many times decide to enrol their children to a majority school hoping to provide them a better future. The Brittany community, as recognised this phenomenon has donated brochures containing the achievements of the program to new-born babies.

Kinga Gál highlighted that "the achievements of the MELT program has to be supported in a wider range. Not only in Western but also in Middle and Eastern Europe, moreover, we have to raise awareness to the program in majority societies as well". "The priority is to make the majority societies realise the importance of the minority societies' language" added the MEP.

Kinga Gál expressed the hope that the European Commission will use the achievements of the project when developing the application system of the next year's financial period. Finally, she stated "I believe that with this program we will achieve that in Europe multilingualism will not only mean the support of the European languages, but also the support of the minority and regional languages as well."