Greece

Key Findings overall

There is significant and long term investment in the learning of foreign languages in Greece. A diversity of other languages is also spoken deriving from the Balkans and other parts of the world but there is little discussion of this as it is tied to debates about immigration. We experienced an overall reluctance to provide data in most domains which we believe to be partly due to unfamiliarity with research of this kind but also due to our intervention at the peak of the economic crisis with the country in a state of alert. The issue of multilingualism was not perceived by many potential data providers as a priority. There is clearly a need to address Greek monolingualism in state and public services and the dominance of English is of concern throughout all domains. The lack of key agencies working on multilingualism either in the state or NGO sector may be a barrier to this as the responsibility currently falls to individual academics and researchers and other community organizations. Such organisations might ordinarily focus on widening participation and representation of different linguistic communities - we found no evidence of these kinds of initiatives during the data collection. 

Promising initiatives and pilots

Regarding regional and minority languages in primary education we found evidence of two programmes at Aristotle University in Thessaloniki which offer help to schools with repatriates, immigrants and Roma students. This was the only time the Roma community was represented in our data set. The survey to promote heritage languages is also a very promising initiative. Ministry of Education/university partnerships offer one month Modern Greek language and culture courses for foreign students, teachers of Greek and Greek scholars. Scholarships are available for Greek students to study in the EU and other countries and attend undergraduate, postgraduate and foreign language seminars. The State Scholarship Foundation (IKY) awards mobility scholarships to students and teaching staff encouraging their contact with other education systems and their familiarization with the culture and language of another European country (Eurydice 2009/10: 222-223). This is as of 2010 and may have changed with the onset of the economic crisis.

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