The day for all who want to celebrate linguistic diversity in Europe

Since 2001, the Council of Europe has celebrated September 26th as the European Day of Languages. The initiative aims to raise awareness of the linguistic and cultural diversity in the countries of Europe. Multilingualism is important for intercultural understanding.

This is a day when we encourage you to learn more about languages, perhaps consider learning one, even if you haven't before. All languages are valuable and worth learning. And whether you already speak several or bad experiences at school have convinced you that you can't learn languages, we recommend Esperanto. It's designed to be easy and many resources are free.

Esperanto is an expression that nobody should have to remain monolingual. It's a gateway to meeting people from other backgrounds and talking to them on an equal footing. And it's a way of developing the skills to learn a language with something easy and rewarding, before you apply those skills to help you acquire more challenging other languages.

Many Esperantists open their homes to Esperanto-speaking travellers and mingle at international holidays where they share the foods and cultures of their native lands. And a few of them even raise multilingual children who have Esperanto as one of their native languages, quite often the consequence of people from different linguistic backgrounds meeting through Esperanto and subsequently falling in love.