ELM gives you an overview of language legislation and language planning in Europe. How many countries have a language law? What languages are used as language of instruction in higher education? What languages are used on company websites, and which countries have specific programs to support language technology for their languages? You can browse and compare language laws, find information about the status of minority languages, the use of languages in the media and the use of language technology in many European countries. The main focus is on official regulations and their implementation. We have taken great care to provide comments, quotes, links and translations of legislation wherever possible. The data for ELM is collected every 4 years since 2009. The current version, ELM 4, is based on data collected in 2017-2018.
ELM 4 is based on a questionnaire which has been filled out by the official institutions of language of each country associated in the European Federation for Institutions of National Languages (EFNIL). The answers contain quantitative and qualitative data such as quotes from legislative texts and other texts in the original language and their translation into English.
ELM 4 contains answers from 22 countries to questions on 9 main topics:
Some questions are not applicable to countries in which English is an official language. Some questions must be interpreted in a specific way for countries that are federations. If exact data or figures are not available, estimates are given and the sources are quoted. It is indicated where an answer is based on personal information or whether it constitutes a general estimate.
The following countries have not yet submitted data to ELM: Italy, Spain, France, Malta , Rumania and Cyprus.
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