Basque and Occitan in the new global context : some reflections on language coexistence in multilingual education

Nowadays educational systems in Europe are recommended by the European Union to teach at least one foreign language — and preferably two — next to the local languages of the country. These educational recommendations follow up on the modern advances in technology and the increasing demand for international communication and mobility. Multilingual education in global contexts confronts education with the need to manage and organize relationships between different languages at school. Not only is it important to manage the local and foreign languages of the curriculum, but also the differing first languages of the students should be taken into account in order to guarantee a correct development — or at least maintenance — of the competences in those languages in the case of, for instance, migrant students (Siguån 2002).

This challenge is even greater when minority and majority languages and the lingua franca, usually English, need to coexist, as language policies and schools must design and implement a curriculum including the teaching of each language, converting the educational system in at least a trilingual one. Not only do schools have to respond to the international needs of communication in foreign languages; the minority languages should also be supported. The growing recognition of minority languages has actually encouraged multilingualism (Gorter 2013).