Michael de Laine

By Michael de Laine, Copenhagen, 23rd November 2008

Funding for mother-tongue teaching has fallen since the local authorities were given responsibility for the teaching. While experts believe that mother-tongue teaching helps the children learn Danish and other subjects, the government disagrees.

If you’re a child of parents from Peru with Spanish mother tongue and living in Greve, south of Copenhagen, the local education authority will not offer you publicly financed teaching in your mother tongue. But your neighbour from Spain will be offered such teaching by the local education authority. However, if you both moved to Copenhagen, then you would both be offered Spanish teaching at the local authority’s expense up to 5th grade.

Some local authorities provide the teaching for free, others charge parents; some local authorities refer to private schools offering the teaching, others say they have no knowledge of the private market.

This differential treatment based on geographical origin may be unfair and discriminatory, and may vary from local authority to local authority, but it is quite legal as things stand today, according to a recently released report on mother-tongue teaching in Denmark.

Since a change in law took effect in 2002, the number of children receiving mother-tongue teaching has fallen drastically. This has occurred partly because the responsibility and funding was moved from the state to the local authorities, and partly because the law restricted the geographical area for mandatory mother-tongue teaching to the European Union (EU) and the European Economic Area (EEA - Norway, Iceland and Liechtenstein), plus Greenland and the Faroe Islands.

But many local authorities – which complain that, generally, they are strapped for cash under the present government - have cut their spending mother-tongue teaching because they do not need to offer it to pupils from outside these geographic areas.

As a result, while almost many thousands of pupils received mother-tongue teaching in 2002/2003, only about 5,000 have mother-tongue teaching today in the 79 local authorities answering a questionnaire circulated by the Documentation and Advisory Center on Race Discrimination, DRC.

There are about 62,000 bilingual pupils in the Danish school system, with about 7,500 children from EU/EEA countries plus Greenland and the Faroe Islands, so only about 12% of them receive mother-tongue teaching.

The reason for the change was the government’s wish to use the funding to strengthen Danish lessons for bilingual children at pre-school level. This decision went against the recommendations of the majority of the parliamentary education committee, who argued that experts and practitioners agreed that mother-tongue teaching promotes the individual child’s learning and linguistic uptake.

According to the DRC report, the 2002 decision deviates from the recommendations for equality for ethnic minorities in education of international organisations such as the United Nations and the European Parliament. The parliament adopted a resolution in 2005 strongly recommending that immigrant children should receive teaching in their mother tongue and their home country’s culture, even if they master their host country’s language.

“Language is a learning tool and if children can speak their mother tongue, then they are better placed for learning other subjects and languages,” Bergthora Kristjansdottir, a researcher at the Danish University of Education, told the Copenhagen Voice. “They can also make communities on the background of their mother tongue, so families can keep together on the background of a common linguistic framework.”

Parents answering a questionnaire for the DRC report said they see a well-developed mother tongue as a means of communication in the family, as a strengthened experience of belonging, as a learning tool, as something valuable in itself, and as a benefit to society.

These parental comments underline Kristjansdottir’s view: “When we say that schools have many visions, one of the things we mean is schools must prepare the children in subjects that are important today, such electronic media, the internet and so on,” the researcher said. “Language is one of these important competences. The able to speak Arabic, for instance, is also a competence that can be used in the world.”

One of the local authorities that offers publicly supported mother-tongue teaching to children of all origins up to 5th grade is Ringsted, where 13.1% of all school children are bilingual. According to Torben Lyster, the director of the local authority’s children’s and cultural affairs department, this costs Ringsted DKK 500,000 a year. “Neighbouring local authorities do not offer mother-tongue teaching,” Lyster told the Copenhagen Voice, “nor will they pay for it if we offer the teaching to their pupils.”

Two years ago, the United Nations’ Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD) stated that Denmark should revise the differential treatment of children in terms of mother-tongue teaching. The question has been before the European Court of Human Rights, which ruled that the European Union could have discriminatory regulations provided EU citizens were treated equally. So far, no-one has successfully challenged the decision.

“According to my knowledge, this situation between nationals and non-nationals is not interpreted as discriminatory because the European Court of Human Rights has said – and, in some case, also CERD – that the EU is a special area with its own citizenship,” Eva Ersbøll of the Danish Institute for Human Rights told the Copenhagen Voice. “So it’s not discrimination based on national origin or ethnic background, it is differentiation based on union citizenship or on being a national of an EU member state or not a national of a member state.”

The treatment may be unfair and differential. “But I don’t think you can convince a court that it is discriminatory in a legal sense,” Ersbøll added. “I don’t think going to other international courts would change anything. It’s generally accepted that countries can treat their nationals differently from non-nationals.”

The report, ‘Danmark har ondt i modersmålet (Denmark: the pain of mother-tongue teaching)’, is available at www.drc.dk.