Norwegian vice chair

Steinar Nybøle, director of the Norwegian Foreign Language Centre (Østfold University College) is re-elected vice chair of The European Centre for Modern Languages, a unit under the Council of Europe

Steinar Nybøle

The Council of Europe (Conseil de l’Europe, founded in 1949) is the oldest and geographically the largest organization in Europe. The most important tasks of the council are to protect human rights, democracy and the rule of law. In order to achieve this, people in Europe need to be able to communicate with each other. In 1994, the European Centre for Modern Languages was set up as a partial agreement of the Council of Europe to adress the issue of language and communication.

Today there are 34 member states of the centre, and Norway is represented through the Norwegian National Centre for Multicultural Education (observer) OsloMet and the Norwegian National Centre for English and other Foreign Languages in Education at the Østfold University College (HiØ).

The director of the Norwegian Foreign Language Centre, Dr. Steinar Nybøle, was recently re-elected vice chair of the governing board of the European Centre. Because of Nybøle’s involvement, Norway has a good opportunity to influence Europe’s development when it comes to languages.

"The Council of Europe's Language Centre encourages more people to learn more languages, and at the same time protect linguistic heritage and multiculturalism, says Nybøle."

"The work of the language centre is very practical and the goal is to develop tools that can be used in many countries. The center also offers free "training & consultancy" to all member states. Here you can pick from a long list of many interesting topics."

Right now, the centre is working to prepare recommendations for strengthening democracy in Europe through multilingual and intercultural education (Recommendation on the importance of plurilingual and intercultural education for democratic culture). The proposal has recently passed the Governing Board of the Language Centre (ECML) and is now being forwarded to the Council of Europe in Strasbourg.

Learning more languages is therefore not only important when travelling and when trading across national borders, but is also important for preserving and developing democracy - not only far away, but as a matter of fact also in our own country, says Nybøle thoughtfully.