(click here for direct links to the regional dossiers)

Background Regional Dossiers

One of the principle goals of the Mercator European Research Centre on Multilingualism and Language Learning is to gather, store and distribute information on minority language education in European regions. There is a need for documents which give a brief outline of the most essential features of the educational system of regions with an autochthonous lesser-used language. With the establishment of Regional dossiers we intend to meet this need.

Target Group Regional Dossiers

• Policy makers
• Researchers
• Teachers
• Students
• Journalists 

Aim Regional Dossiers

Regional dossiers aim at providing concise descriptive information and basic educational statistics about minority language education in a specific region of the European Union. For the definition of minority language used by the Mercator Research Centre please look here. The Regional dossiers are written according to a fixed structure. In this way the Regional dossiers can also be used for comparative research. This information can serve several purposes and contains among others: 

• Features of the educational system
• Recent educational policies
• Division of responsibilities
• Main actors
• Legal arrangements
• Support structures
• Quantitive information

Latest Regional dossiers:

• Albanian in Italy (July 2010)
• Frisian in the Netherlands (4th) (reprint July 2010)
• Latgalian in Latvia (June 2009)

Expected Regional dossiers

• Corsican in France (2nd)
• Gaelic in the UK (2nd)
• Hungarian in Slovenia
• Italian in Slovenia
• Manx Gaelic in Isle of Man
• Occitan in France (2nd)
• Serbian in Hungary
• Swedish in Finland (2nd)

We have compiled the following dossiers

You are free to download and print the dossiers for personal use. Organisations/ institutions that would like to print an original version of one of the dossiers (to be printed by a publisher in their country) can ask Mercator for the relevant dossier as a publisher's file. Publisher's files are available for some of the dossiers, for the other dossiers only the PDF-files (above) are available.

We would appreciate it if you could let us know if you print a dossier in large numbers for distribution at conferences, events etc.
  
Saskia Benedictus and Tjallien Kalsbeek are responsible for the edition of the Mercator Research Centre Regional dossiers series. You can contact Tjallien for any questions or suggestions. Moreover, as we would like to inform about all language communities within member states of the Council of Europe, organisations or specialists in the field of education can express their interest for compiling a report. Considering our annual schedule and your time we can come to a mutual agreement to include your publication in our Regional dossiers series.