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What language do your neighbours speak?
How can you get involved?
Why is this important?
For young people, mastering one or more foreign languages is vital in today's ever-smaller world, nowhere more so than in the EU.
But it's not always easy. This initiative seeks to move out of the classroom and make better use of the untapped linguistic resources around us, transforming languages into something real that help us discover new places, cultures and people.
The idea is to give kids a taste of the languages they're most likely to encounter – those of their classmates or the ones used just across the border – even if these are not in the curriculum.
Videos
Androulla Vassiliou, EU education commissioner, and Iveke Keisele, a language teacher from Latvia, spoke to eTwinning about the importance of this initiative.
“The harmonious co-existence of many languages is a powerful symbol of the EU's aspiration to be united, but at the same time, diverse. But that harmony depends crucially on being able to communicate across language borders. And that is one of the main reasons why the EU supports language learning.” – Androulla Vassiliou
“It's much better if you learn your neighbour’s language. […]. It broadens the learning of the language. The pupils step out of the formal framework of the language class, where one must speak in grammatically correct sentences. It opens up the emotional language and the children begin to speak freely.” - Iveke Keisele
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