ERC bases its proposal on the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages of 1992. The Charter has been ratified by 19 of 46 members of the Council of Europe, including Spain. The document aims to protect and promote regional and minority languages as a threatened aspect of Europe’s cultural heritage and to enable speakers of a regional or minority language to use it in private and public life.

In Spain there are about 700,000 Roma and, in spite of the strong assimilation policy, some of them continue to speak Cale, a dialect of the Romany language. Spain already recognize Catalan, Galician and Basque as co-official languages in the regions where they are spoken.

Romany is nowadays the language of milions citizens of the EU and the number of Romany speakers might grow after the next enlargement.

However, according to Dzeno’s information, Romany has not been considered as official language by any EU member state yet. Romany remained unoticed also on September 26, the established as European Day of Languages. (Dzeno Association)

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