MULTILINGUALISM AND CULTURAL DIVERSITY; EDUCATIONAL CHALLENGES OF THE 21ST CENTURY
MULTILINGUALISM AND CULTURAL DIVERSITY; EDUCATIONAL CHALLENGES OF THE 21ST CENTURY

Summary/Abstract: We live in a diverse and rapidly changing world, with growing cultural diversity and multilingualism as expressions of challenges of a better integration in new intercultural and interlingual communities. Towards the end of the 20th century, the European life became more international and multilingual; as a result, ever since the Founding Treaties, the promotion of language learning with an emphasis on multilingualism and of intercultural exchanges has become a corner stone of the EU policy, legislation and practices. The EU issued documents and basic projects on European languages policies meant to regulate a European integrative perspective and assumed the assistance of member states in developing and promoting a coherent European policy in this respect. The paper intends to present a brief review of the most important European policies regarding multilingualism and cultural diversity, the operational terms applied to define them as well as some of the measures that education should take in order to foster the learner’s appropriate education and inclusion into the social and economical background.

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