Professor Volodymyr Zahorskyi, Rector of UNFU and a corresponding Member of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, said: “Implementing the state policy, fulfilling the legislation of Ukraine, in particular, the Law of Ukraine ‘On Ensuring the Functioning of Ukrainian as the State Language’, regulatory documents of the Ministry of Education and Science of Ukraine and to form a culture of quality teaching, learning and use of the official languages of the European Union by participants in the educational process, it was decided to hold several scientific, communicative and educational events on foreign languages at the University.”
It should be noted that in May last year, the Ukrainian language was officially included in the European Commission's translation system. For Ukraine, this is an important strategic step that facilitates negotiations on EU membership. The preservation and development of languages is declared as the official language policy of the European Union. The standard for a modern European is to speak at least two foreign languages, that is why one of the UNFU priorities is to study foreign languages. To this end, many cooperation agreements have been concluded with foreign partners, in particular with leading European educational institutions, and appropriate conditions have been created for students to facilitate language learning. Today's event is another confirmation of this.”
The special guests of the Day of European Union Languages at UNFU were: Honorary Consul of the Kingdom of Belgium in Lviv Yaroslav Hartsula and Assistant Consul General of Germany in Lviv Lilia Dubyk.
As part of the European Union Day of Languages, the Department of Foreign Languages held an educational event on the topic: European Languages Day: Immerse yourself in the world of linguistics, where students learned about the diversity of cultures and customs of peoples.
It should be noted that there are about 260 languages in Europe. They make up only 3% of the world's languages, and 24 of them have the status of official languages of the European Union: Bulgarian, English, Bulgarian, Danish, Estonian, Irish, Spanish, Italian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Maltese, German, Dutch, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Slovak, Slovenian, Hungarian, Finnish, French, Croatian, Czech, Swedish, and Spanish. These languages are officially and equally used in EU institutions. English, French, and German have the highest status of “procedural” languages of the European Commission (while the European Parliament accepts all official languages as working languages). We all want our native language to be among them.