<h6><strong>The Diplomat</strong></h6> <h4><strong>The Organization of Ibero-American States for Education, Science and Culture (OEI) has launched this past Thursday an Expert Commission on Multilingualism, whose objective is to continue promoting the role of Ibero-American languages, especially Spanish and Portuguese, as languages of science and culture, as well as to continue promoting the development of indigenous languages in the region from a global perspective and projected in the digital context.</strong></h4> This is a high-level advisory body made up of a dozen specialists in various branches of knowledge related to the development of languages such as linguistics, pedagogy, economics, science and new technologies, and whose mission will be, among others, to advise the OEI in the implementation of its programs and projects in the area of multilingualism and promotion of the languages of the region, according to the organization in a press release. According to data from the Cervantes Institute, Spanish is the second most spoken native language in the world, the third most used on the Internet —after English and Chinese—, the second language in which the most scientific documents are published and also one of the six official languages of the United Nations. Portuguese, on the other hand, is spoken by 260 million people on four continents, one of the fastest growing languages and is the fifth most used language on the Internet. Both languages add up to a community of more than 850 million people with enormous potential given their high intelligibility. During the first meeting of the commission, which took place on Thursday, Mariano Jabonero, secretary general of the OEI, thanked its members for accepting the invitation and acknowledged “their passion for the transformative power of language, diversity and linguistic inclusion.” “We know that the contribution of each of you will be fundamental to building policies that not only preserve, but also value the rich linguistic plurality of our region,” said Jabonero. The commission is made up of António Branco, from the University of Lisbon, (Portugal); Bianca Amaro, coordinator of the Brazilian Open Access Program of the Brazilian Institute of Information in Science and Technology (Brazil); Darío Villanueva, from the Royal Spanish Academy – RAE (Spain); Fernanda Beigel, from the National Scientific and Technical Research Council – CONICET (Argentina); Gilvan Müller de Oliveira, professor at the Federal University of Santa Catarina (Brazil); Hugo Barreto, director of the Vale Cultural Institute (Brazil); Jasone Cenoz, president of the Education Commission of the State Research Agency – AEI (Spain); João Neves, executive director of the International Portuguese Language Institute – IILP (Cape Verde); José Luis García Delgado, professor at the Complutense University of Madrid (Spain); Luis Enrique López Hurtado, from the Ibero-American Institute of Indigenous Languages (Peru); Luís Reto, professor at the Higher Institute of Labor and Business Sciences of the Instituto Universitário de Lisboa (Portugal), and Valentina Canese, director of the Higher Institute of Languages Instituto Superior de Lenguas of the National University of Asunción (Paraguay).
