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The Commission’s first Communication on Multilingualism

The Commission’s first ever Communication on Multilingualism “A New Framework Strategy for Multilingualism” was adopted in November 2005. The Communication complements the Commission’s Action Plan “Promoting Language Learning and Linguistic Diversity”.

The Communication set out three basic strands to the EU’s multilingualism policy:

  1. ensuring that citizens have access to EU legislation, procedures and information in their own language
  2. underlining the major role that languages and multilingualism play in the European economy, and finding ways to develop this further
  3. encouraging all citizens to learn and speak more languages, in order to improve mutual understanding and communication

Member States are invited to establish national plans to promote multilingualism, and the Commission is also working with them to implement the European Indicator of Language Competence, a measure to gather reliable data on the foreign language skills of young people.

Last update: 07 February 2012

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