Bulgaria

Key Findings overall

Our LRE research revealed many strong points in multilingualism in the areas of education at all levels, both for the national language and for foreign languages. Some important steps have been made towards a greater involvement of regional/minority languages in education and in the media.

Areas that need further development are public services and businesses.

Promising initiatives and pilots

Lilyana Kovatcheva, Director of the Centre of Educational Integration of Children and Young people from the Minorities (affiliated to MoEYS), was one of the six national consultants for The Curriculum Framework for Romani, created by the Language Policy Division of the Council of Europe in 2008 (http://www.coe.int/t/dg4/linguistic/Romani_doc_EN.asp).

The European Day of Languages in Bulgaria is a successful event organised by EUNIC – the network of European Union National Institutes for Culture. In its last edition the following member institutions participated: the Austrian Embassy, the British Council, the Czech Centre, the Polish Institute, French Institute, Goethe Institute, Hellenic Foundation of Culture, Hungarian Cultural Institute, Instituto Cervantes, Embassy of Spain, Italian Cultural Institute, as well as partners from the Russian Cultural Centre, the Embassy of Switzerland, the Directorate General for Translation to the European Commission, the Bulgarian Cultural Institute, and the Human Resource Development Centre. The European Day of Languages 2011 was supported by Sofia Municipality, MoEYS, with the media partnership of the Bulgarian National Radio.