The Swiss government now recognizes the dialect of the Jura region as minority language. The Federal Council follows a recommendation of the Council of Europe (10 December 2018), in which the Advisory Committee on the Framework Convention called on the Swiss authorities to do more to protect the rights of persons belonging to national minorities and to ensure the equality of the various linguistic communities. The recognition of the Franco-Provençal patois of Valais, Friborg and Vaud is therefore extended to that of the oïl Franc-Comtois of the Jura. With the recognition, Switzerland gives new visibility to the patois of French-speaking Switzerland. Switzerland has already declared Romansh and Italian minority languages within the meaning of the Charter and recognizes Yenish and Yiddish as languages without territory.

The project 'Holi-Frysk - Multilingual Education for Everyone' has recently received a follow-up grant from the the Province of Friesland for two years. The project aims to develop plurilingual teaching approaches and materials for different types of secondary schools, and to investigate their implementation and its effects on language attitudes of teachers and classroom interaction. Holi-Frysk '1.0' served as a pilot study and focused on plurilingualism in mainstream secondary education from a holistic perspective, combining: a) different types of secondary schools by working with a trilingual, a mainstream and a newcomer school; b) different multilingual teaching approaches by using principles of the language awareness, language comparison, receptive multilingualism, CLIL and immersion methods; and c) different types of languages by including national, regional minority, foreign and migrant languages. The project was run by the Mercator European Research Centre and different partners (2017-2018); the follow-up will be led by the NHL Stenden University of Applied Sciences and will have Mercator as one of its partners. All developed activities and materials can be found at the project's website.

Sociolinguist Norbert Kiss from Prague makes short documentaries about minority languages for his Youtube channel LingoNor. In november he was on holiday in Leeuwarden and visited the Mercator European Research Centre at the Fryske Akademy. He was very interested in what we do and he made this lovely six minutes documentary about our institute. Thank you, Norbert!