The Chair of the NPLD, Miquel Àngel Sureda Massanet, will intervene at the next session of the European Parliament Intergroup for Traditional Minorities, National Communities and Languages, the 16th of February 2023 in Strasbourg, which will be devoted to the inclusion of Catalan, Basque and Galician into the Online Language Support (OLS). The Chair of the NPLD will be accompanied by some members of the Network, such as Miren Dobaran (Basque Government), Xavier Vila (Government of Catalonia), Valentín García (Government of Galicia), Beatriu Defior (Government of the Balearic Islands), Mikel Arregi (Government of Navarre) and Ignasi Casadesús (Xarxa Vives d’Universitats).
The Online Language Support (OLS) is a tool designed to help Erasmus+ and European Solidarity Corps participants to improve their knowledge of the language in which they will work, study or volunteer abroad. The aim is to make language support accessible in a flexible way contributing to the promotion of language learning and linguistic diversity and reducing the language barrier to participating in European mobility opportunities. The NPLD demands the European Commission to include Catalan, Basque and Galician into the OLS system to enable participants in mobility programmes to learn them and make the most out of their experience.
OLS is available for all European Union languages and will be soon available in Icelandic, Macedonian, Norwegian, Serbian and Turkish. However, languages such as Basque, Galician and Catalan (with official status in the Spanish territories of Catalonia, Navarre, Valencia, the Balearic Islands, the Basque Country and Galicia) are excluded from this platform. These are languages of instruction in the entire education system of the aforementioned territories where more than 10.000 Erasmus+ students arrived during the pre-pandemic period.
European Parliament intergroups are formed by Members from any political group and any committee, to hold informal exchanges of views on particular subjects and promote contact between Members and civil society. In this case, the Intergroup for Traditional Minorities, National Communities and Languages, re-established in 2009, promotes awareness of and gives political representation to the interests of national and linguistic minority issues in Europe.