Context of the BABEL project in Public Administration

There are two crucial facts within the European Union which shape the context and the need of this project, the Green Paper on the European Research Area, and the cultural and scientific diversity of languages used in the EU.

First, there is a ‘Green Paper: The European Research Area: New Perspectives’ from the Commission. This Green Paper (2007) clearly states that the ERA concept includes a European ‘internal market’ for research, where researchers, technology and knowledge freely circulate, and where increasingly there is a need to have effective European-level coordination of national and regional research activities, programmes and policies.
A second observation is that there are 23 official languages within the European Union,
In the context of the 2008 European Year of Intercultural Dialogue, the Commission has created a Group of Intellectuals for Intercultural Dialogue which has been entrusted with the task of defining the contribution of multilingualism to intercultural dialogue.

There are 23 official languages in the EU: Bulgarian, Czech, Danish, German (18% of the EU), Estonian, Greek, English (13%), Spanish, French (12%), Irish, Italian (13%), Latvian, Lithuanian, Hungarian, Maltese, Dutch, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Slovak, Slovene, Finnish, and Swedish.

The Eurobaromenter survey on the language skills of European citizens, and their attitudes towards language learning shows a clear support to language learning. 56 % of citizens in the EU Member States say they are able to hold a conversation in one language apart from their mother tongue and 28 % of the respondents state that they speak two foreign languages well enough to have a conversation. English remains the most widely spoken foreign language throughout Europe, German being the most widely spoken mother tongue.

The foreign languages most commonly used in the EU are English (38%), French (14%), German (14%), Spanish (6%), Russian (6%), Italian (3%), and Polish (1%) (European Commission (2006) Special Eurobarometer 243: Europeans and their languages. Brussels, February 2006).