The 2025 ELEN General Assembly, held in Barcelona at the Born Centre de Cultura i Memòria and co-organised with CIEMEN, hosted two Fosterlang workshops that offered complementary and in-depth perspectives on the current challenges of revitalising and promoting Europe’s minoritised languages.
The first workshop, corresponding to Work Package 3, opened the Assembly on the morning of Friday the 14th with the session “Immersion Education and Multilingual Classrooms. The Catalan Experience”, moderated by Elin Haf Gruffydd Jones, Daniel Wutti and Mònica Pereña. The session focused on exploring the core elements of the Catalan immersion model, combining strategic analysis, classroom practice and personal testimonies.
Montse Montagut, Director of the Llengües d’Origen Programme at the Catalan Government’s Department of Education, presented the institutional perspective and the evolution of immersion policies over recent decades. From there, several teachers shared their experiences in multilingual classrooms, explaining how daily practice is organised so that Catalan functions as a vehicular language and a cohesive tool in settings with students from highly diverse backgrounds.
This professional dimension was complemented by particularly moving contributions from individuals who described first-hand how the everyday use of Catalan in school and community life supported their process of adapting to Barcelona, strengthening both their language learning and their social integration.
The session concluded with contributions from researchers and activists from various European countries, who offered case studies and comparative reflections, showing how the Catalan experience resonates with other contexts and can serve as a reference for multilingual settings elsewhere.
After lunch, the second workshop took place, corresponding to Work Package 6 and dedicated to exploring how language technologies and social media can help engage communities and strengthen the presence of minoritised languages in the digital sphere. The session, coordinated by Mònica Pereña and moderated by Justyna Olko, brought together content creators such as Blanca Trull (Catalan), Welmoed Sjoerdstra (Frisian) and Dessie Donnelly (Irish), alongside representatives of organisations and NGOs including Plataforma per la Llengua, Òmnium Cultural, HIGA, YEN, CIEMEN, and Kasia Wojtylak from the University of Warsaw.
Both the creators and the organisations shared their strategies for reaching specific audiences—especially younger people—emphasising how to produce content that is engaging, accessible and emotionally resonant, encouraging linguistic pride and promoting everyday use of the language.
They discussed different engagement tactics, participatory campaigns and ways of building digital communities, highlighting the value of personal narratives, humour, creativity and collaboration between institutional and community actors. The workshop demonstrated how the thoughtful and sensitive use of digital platforms can increase the visibility of minoritised languages and contribute to their normalisation in the spaces where today’s cultural conversations take place.
Together, the two workshops reflected Fosterlang’s transversal approach: integrating education, community, technology and activism to reinforce linguistic vitality from multiple angles. The 2025 ELEN General Assembly thus served as a meeting point for exchanging knowledge, experiences and strategies that strengthen the future of our languages—from the classroom to the digital sphere.
