EDITORIAL | REDAKTORIAUS ŽODIS

Abstract

A decade has passed since 1 May 2004, when Lithuania together with other eight countries of the central and eastern Europe as well as Cyprus and Malta joined the community of the European Member states by bringing its ancient language together with its dialects and language variations as well as other cultural heritage treasures to the multilingual and multicultural tapestry of the European Union. The ten countries of the EU represented by more than 100 million citizens added 10 new languages from three language families, i.e. Indo-European (Slavic, Baltic branches), Uralic (Finno-Ugric branch) and Afro-Asiatic (Semitic branch) with over half a hundred of dialects to the multilingual EU linguistic and cultural heritage. Development of multilingualism and management of this process required adequate consideration, thus responsibility for multilingualism was delegated to the Commissioner for Education and Culture by extending his duties with those for training and multilingualism. However, it was in 2007 that language issues received most recognition, when a new post of the Commissioner for Multilingualism was created to take the responsibility for language policy of the European Union by promoting multilingualism for the citizens and EU institutions. However, in 2010, the responsibility for multilingualism was again remerged with other functions of the Commissioner for Education, Culture and Youth and, according to Riain and Reinvert (2011), “multilingualism policy has again become politically less salient” (p. 24).