Germany to promote its language abroad

Thu, 30 Dec 2010

Berlin - Germany is to promote its language abroad with a series of advertising campaigns encouraging people to learn German, the minister for culture and media said Thursday.

"More and more countries are removing a second compulsory language from school curricula. This means only English remains as a first foreign language," Cornelia Pieper told the German Press Agency dpa.

"Even within Europe, they are no longer keeping to the agreement to promote multilingualism," she added.

The comments came a day after the Transport Ministry banned the use of more than 100 English words, such as "laptop", amongst staff.

Around 150 German schools and a further 1,500 partner schools exist around the world. In the last five years, the number of German speakers worldwide has declined from 17 million to 14.5 million.

Source: Earth Times.
Link: http://www.earthtimes.org/articles/news/360152,germany-promote-language-abroad.html.