OPENING ADDRESS BY THE MINISTER OF EDUCATION, THE HON. LOUIS GALEA, AT THE COUNCIL OF EUROPE SEMINAR AS PART OF THE EUROPEAN YEAR OF LANGUAGES ON "LANGUAGE TEACHING TODAY AND TOMORROW"

Forum Hotel, St Andrew's. Monday, 12^th March 2001

We all agree that a language is not only one of our more significant and effective modes of expression and communication, but also an example of humankind's ability to create sounds and to refashion the world accordingly. Through language we name the world, we call people and animals and objects. We talk to God Himself and to others as well as to ourselves. Language is the sole tool of poets and novelists and all writers. They fall in love with words and intensify our feelings through the subtle way they handle them. Literature is the ultimate point a language can reach. At the same time, however_, we resort to language to establish contacts with everyone and everything.

A language is indeed a reflection of our inner system of being, a way of discovering silence itself. We sometimes fall into silence, namely we suspend our productive process of sounds. Children enjoy creating words, imitating sounds, resorting to the repetition of words. As we grow older, we hopefully tend to be less aggressive on language, eventually to reduce our consumption of words.

As we discover the world inside and around us, we develop our own native tongue, that which will always be our most faithful way of dealing with ourselves and with others. Nothing can replace the native tongue, the one we derived from the earliest days of our existence. The native language embodies what will always remain the most profound and intimate in us. It is indeed unreplaceable.

This is obvious to all, and that is why the European Union repeatedly stresses the importance of native languages, urging governments to increase their roles in all spheres of life. Agreement on such issues is nowadays universal throughout the world, and riot only throughout our continent, especially so far as education is concerned. The native tongue is equally effective in providing permanent education, a lifelong process.

On the sound basis of one's native tongue, the acquisition of a foreign or second language is positively constructed. More than ever before, every community needs to he exposed to a second or a third language. It may be the speech medium of a community within ones own, or that of a neighbouring ethnic group. Situations vary from place to place, but the principle remains that we do need to communicate with a wider sector, and that necessitates the knowledge of another language.

That is why the European Union, apart from stressing the obvious importance of the native tongue, is also advocating the learning of another language, and perhaps of one or two more. Unification cannot be properly built on soliloques, nor can it be constructed on the loss of one's own linguistic heritage. This is naturally unthinkable, utterly undesirable. The EU is there to make us grow richer, and not to encourage cultural impoverisation. So the coexistence of languages is being defined as a positive step in the right direction, namely as a solid contribution towards a greater degree of mutual understanding.

A language is a means to an end, not an end in itself. The cultivation of a language implies the development of its usage in all sphere of life. That is what we envisage for our national language, as we follow the footsteps of all our European colleagues. At the same time we must ascertain that our knowledge of English and other languages we need because of our cultural and geographical situation is strengthened. We belong to ourselves to our region and to our continent, and that may actually help us define the roles we design for specific languages.