The UNESCO Chair participated in the consortium meeting of the language revitalization project RISE UP in Spain

On October 25-27, representatives of the UNESCO Chair on Applied Studies of Intangible Cultural Heritage at the University of Tartu, Professor Kristin Kuutma and Maarja Veisson, participated in the consortium meeting of the project RISE UP (revitalising languages, safeguarding cultural diversity") in Barcelona and Vielha, Spain.

The three-year Horizon Europe project RISE UP aims to provide support and empowerment to endangered language communities in Europe through the collection and analysis of context information and policies for endangered languages in Europe, the creation of a tool set for communities, the connection of relevant actors and the involvement of young people, specifically.

Case studies of five endangered languages ​​are central to the project. Endangered languages ​​included in the project are Aranese in Spain, Aromanian in the Balkans and Greece, Burgenland Croatian in Austria, Cornish in the United Kingdom and Seto in Estonia.

The task of the University of Tartu in the project is to study and analyze language policy guidelines and their impact on endangered languages ​​in various European countries, both historically and in the present. In doing so, attention is paid to the mutual influence of different levels of language policy (European Union, state and local community level).

The purpose of the meeting between Barcelona and Vielha was to get acquainted with the situation of the Aran language, one of the pilot languages ​​of the project, and to get a better overview of the current activities and problems of the other work packages of the project. Meetings were held with advocates of the Aran language in the small town of Vielha, located high in the Pyrenees mountains. During our discussion with the leaders of the Aran Language Institute (Institut d'Aran) and the local government (Conselh Generau d'Aran), we heard, among other things, that all the children who go to school in this valley learn Aran from the age of four to fourteen, and there are quite a lot of language learning materials, dictionaries and literature translated into Aran. Despite this, the number of speakers of the language is decreasing and few use it as their home language. In their free time, school children tend to speak Spanish as well, as many immigrants from southern Spain or Spanish-speaking countries in South America live in the city, for whom communication in Spanish is more natural.

During the meeting and subsequent communication with project partners, members of the UNESCO chair raised the following topics that are currently important for us in the context of this project: the importance of Finno-Ugric ties for Seto activists and in Estonia in general, the international decade of indigenous languages, which is lead by UNESCO, problems in establishing contact with young community members and the need to know more about the possibilities of networking and digital solutions that we can offer to communities, our desire to avoid research fatigue of community members and the importance of putting the community members’ opinion of their cultural legacy first.

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