UNESCO Chair travels to Sao Tome and Principe

Friendship is a wonderful thing. At the UNESCO Chair on World Language Heritage of the UPV/EHU, we are very lucky because we have made many new friends this summer. In Ponferrada, we have met the NGO Cooperación Bierzo Sur; in Castelló de la Plana, the research group TRAMA (Universitat Jaume I); and in Catalonia, the team of TV3's Una mà de contes. And that's not all! With this motley group we went on a trip to Santo Amaro, on the island of São Tomé (Africa), where our circle of friends has grown even more. Together with Nicole, Marta, Ney, Emanuel, Vavá, Mr. Dias, Mrs. Dió and many other friends, we had a very interesting summer.

Our friends from Santo Amaro want to protect and revitalise the language spoken by the elderly, Forro creole, which is being lost over the years. To prevent this, they have translated and dubbed a chapter of Una mà de contes (El Sol i la Lluna) in this language. Thanks to the children and the elderly of Santo Amaro, and to the local radio station Rádio Lobata, we have the privilege of listening to this story in forro.

Certainly, friends are a gift, and learning new languages means discovering new worlds. Worlds that we must not let disappear, because knowledge does not take up space. Or as they say in forro, sêbê na ka kupá lugé fa.

Thank you, our friends! See you soon!

Acknowledgements:

Emanuel

Lia

Marta

Ney

Nicole

Rafael (assistant)

Mr. Dias

Mrs. Dió

Mrs. Luiza Janoto

Mrs. Domingas Bom Jesús

Mrs. Anastacia Lima

Escoteiros of Santo Amaro, especially Amaro Mendes (Sheriff) and Wassiley Souza

Rádio Lobata team, especially Gidel

Manuel Barrios Lucena

Una mà de contes, TV3

NGO Cooperación Bierzo Sur

Universitat Jaume I

Animation to be found on this link: https://www.ccma.cat/tv3/sx3/el-sol-i-la-lluna-21-llengua-forro/video/6179064/

Windows to the world languages

After the collaboration agreement signed with the AZKUE Foundation (www.azkuefundazioa.org), different Internet tools will be used to give precise and accessible information about some minorised languages. Based on the data-base created by UNESCO Etxea and the Chair, we will create a map of the minorised languages of the world that can be found in the Basque Country as a consequence of immigration.
 

Learning of Basque by immigrant children

In the schools of the Basque Country, immigrant children learn the local languages. Learning Basque can be difficult in some environments but, in others, they learn Basque just the same way the speakers of Spanish do. From UPV/EHU's ELEBILAB(www.elebilab.com), together with the language learning and teaching group HIJE, we are analising the learning of Basque by immigrant children that live and are schooled in a Basque-speaking environment, as a subsection in a project of the MICINN.
 

Cultural and linguistic diversity of the immigrants if the Basque Country: new challenges

We are carrying out a research on the presence of the cultural and linguistic diversity that immigration has brought to the Basque Country, together with UNESCO Etxea and IKUSPEGI, and with the collaboration of the Culture Department of the Government of the Basque Country.
 

The Embera language of Colombia and the efforts to create a writing system that enables schooling in that language

The Embera is a minorised language spoken in Colombia and its surroundings. Through the FUCLA University of the Colombian Chocó region, an association of speakers of Embera has made a call for help to unify the writting processes and to create resources to promote schooling in this language. We have designed a program and, with the help of certain organisations, research will start in 2010.