European Charter for Regional or
Minority Languages
The European Charter for Regional or
Minority
Languages
(ECRML)
is
a
European treaty (CETS 148) adopted in 1992
under the auspices of the Council of Europe
to protect and promote historical regional
and minority languages in Europe. It only ap-
plies to languages traditionally used by the
nationals of the State Parties (thus excluding
languages used by recent immigrants from
other states), which significantly differ from
the majority or official language (thus exclud-
ing what the state party wishes to consider
as mere local dialects of the official or major-
ity language) and which either have a territ-
orial basis (and are therefore traditionally
spoken by populations of regions or areas
within the State) or are used by linguistic
minorities within the State as a whole
(thereby including such languages as Yiddish
and Romani, which are used over a wide geo-
graphic area).
Languages which are official within re-
gions or provinces or federal units within a
State (for example Catalan in Spain) are not
classified as official languages of the State
and may therefore benefit from the Charter.
On the other hand, the Republic of Ireland
has not been able to sign the Charter on be-
half of the Irish language (although a minor-
ity language) as it is defined as the first offi-
cial language of the state. The United King-
dom has, though, ratified the Charter in re-
spect of (among other languages) Irish in
Northern Ireland. France, although a signat-
ory has been constitutionally blocked from
ratifying the Charter in respect of the lan-
guages of France.
The charter provides a large number of
different actions state parties can take to
protect and promote historical regional and
minority languages. There are two levels of
protection—all signatories must apply the
lower level of protection to qualifying lan-
guages; signatories may further declare that
a qualifying language or languages will bene-
fit from the higher level of protection which
lists a range of actions fro