[...] I am sure I will spend the rest of my
professional life trying to use IT to take away or at least lower the language
barriers."

The Multilingual Information Society (MLIS) Programme of the European Union
promotes the linguistic diversity of the EU in the information society. It
intends to raise awareness of and stimulate provision of multilingual services,
tolerable conditions for the language industries, reduced cost of information
transfer among languages and contribute to the promotion of linguistic
diversity. The home page of the website is in English, and documents are issues
in many of all 11 EU official languages: Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish,
French, German, Greek, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, and Swedish.

Linguistic pluralism and diversity are everybody's business, as explained in a
petition launched by the European Committee for the Respect of Cultures and
Languages in Europe (ECRCLE) "for a humanist and multilingual Europe, rich of
its cultural diversity".

"Linguistic pluralism and diversity are not obstacles to the free circulation of
men, ideas, goods and services, as would like to suggest some objective allies,
consciously or not, of the dominant language and culture. Indeed,
standardization and hegemony are the obstacles to the free blossoming of
individuals, societies and the information economy, the main source of
tomorrow's jobs. On the contrary, the respect for languages is the last hope for
Europe to get closer to the citizens, an objective always claimed and almost
never put into practice. The Union must therefore give up privileging the
language of one group."

The full text of the petition is available on the Web in the 11 European
official languages of the European Union. The ECRCLE also asks the revisors of
the Treaty of the European Union to include in the text of the treaty the
respect of national cultures and languages. The proposals are concrete. In
particular, the petition asks the governments in each country to "teach the
youth at least two, and preferably three foreign European languages; encourage
the national audiovisual and musical industries; and favour the diffusion of
European works."

In Language Futures Europe, Paul Treanor collects links on language policy,
multilingualism, global language structures, and the dominance of English. The
site starts with a comment on the structures of language. It offers texts and
essays, sections on EU policy, national policies, and